Grow Your Business through Emerging Online Social Networks
By Don Lafferty

Most online social networks still frown on selling through the community, but it’s easy to craft a marketing strategy within a network’s terms of service that will drive traffic to your ecommerce website or directly to your brick and mortar business.

While their use by people in big business is still limited to dating, hobby-related networking, and party announcements, online social networks are a growing part of most everyone's daily online experience.

As I pointed out in my recent Home Business® Magazine article, "Should MySpace Be Part of Your Internet Strategy?" there is growing evidence to support claims that some online social networks can be powerful professional allies to businesses—in particular, entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal connection can be a significant business building block.

MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are the current frontrunners in the online social networking space, although each presents a very different digital persona of the user, and each targets different types of networking objectives.

Marketing Through Online Social Networks
Most online social networks still frown on selling through the community, but it’s easy to craft a marketing strategy within a network’s terms of service that will drive traffic to your ecommerce web site or directly to your brick and mortar business.

MySpace still leads the pack in this arena, hands down. The community is easily searchable; you can have an unlimited number of friends, broadcast messages to all your friends with one click of the mouse, and customize your MySpace visitor experience to the highest degree.

When authors David F. Kramer and Jonathan Maberry decided to launch Cryptopedia Magazine on a shoestring budget, MySpace was the first step of their Internet marketing strategy.

“We knew all along that our target reader was on MySpace just begging for the kind of material we’re going to publish.” said Kramer, author of The Cryptopedia, A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange and Downright Bizarre.

Within the space of three months, Cryptopedia Magazine racked up over seven thousand friends in their target demographic and they’re growing at over one hundred new friends daily.

“MySpace allowed us to perform highly focused friend searches based on key words,” explains Maberry, author of the novel Dead Man’s Song. “Our acceptance to invitation hit rate was over ninety percent once we dialed it in. We know every one of our MySpace friends wants to read what we publish, because they’re telling the world what they like right there on their MySpace pages.”

DO:

• Craft a clear message to your target market. Include pictures, testimonials and links that support your message. Build your site with easy-to-read fonts on solid, contrasting backgrounds.
• Get personal. At least a little. To build relationships on social networking sites, consider sharing a bit of your personal life, such as a hobbies or volunteer work as a small part of your profile. It’ll show your more human side and it resonates with others.
• Communicate with your friends. Be disciplined about welcoming new friends, replying to messages, and commenting on your friends’ sites where applicable. This reinforces the personal nature of your relationship, builds loyalty, bumps up your Google hits, and builds traffic virally.
• Expect honesty. If you’re creating advertising campaigns for social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, you have to be prepared for feedback. Not all of it will be pleasant, but if you listen, you just might learn how to improve your product or your pitch.

DON’T:

• Go overboard with graphic content. Avoid the temptation to pile on the videos and graphic intensive backgrounds. These slow down the loading time of your site and have a tendency to chase people away.
• Over message. Pick your spots. Don’t say something unless you have something to say. Too many bulletins or pointless messages will dilute your objective and diminish your effectiveness. Keep content and messaging relevant. Promoting your product or service on MySpace and Facebook can easily backfire if it doesn’t strike a chord with your target demographic.

Networking for Job Opportunities and Searching for Talent
LinkedIn and Ryze are two of the more popular online networks that facilitate business-oriented connections. Ecademy, Spoke, and OpenBC are among the more specialized sites.
 

Presenting a cleaner, more business-like appearance and providing more layers of security, these sites provide good old-fashioned networking with some high tech twists, allowing the user to see the networks of all his contacts, request introductions, and provide endorsements for co-workers and employees.

Encover Chief Executive Officer Chip Overstreet was on the hunt for a new VP of sales. He had narrowed the search down to one promising candidate. But since nobody volunteers unflattering references, Overstreet tossed the ones in his candidate’s resume’ and turned to LinkedIn and its more than six million registered users. “I did eleven back-door checks on this guy and found people he had worked with at five of his last six companies,” says Overstreet, whose firm sells and manages service contracts. "It was incredibly powerful.”
Microsoft recruiters use business networking sites such as LinkedIn to develop relationships and search for job candidates. Shally Steckerl manages the research arm of Microsoft's global central sourcing team. He has directly connected to about 7,800 people on LinkedIn, according to TopLinked.com, a Web site that keeps tabs on the mostly widely connected people on LinkedIn.

Whether you’re searching for your next job or your next hire, these sites are a must for every business owner, executive, or recruiter. If you’re hoping to score a new job or simply want to build new relationships on a business networking site, pick what you want to be known for and communicate that clearly. Some recruiters use business networking sites as if they were a giant rolodex. You’ll get better job leads if your profile is clear and up to date.

Straddling the fence between MySpace’s pop culture feel and LinkedIn’s boardroom appeal is the media’s new darling, Facebook. Since opening the door to the general public in the fall of 2006, Facebook has grown at a rate comparable to MySpace’s meteoric rise to ubiquity. Business people turned off by the confusing appearance of the average MySpace page are flocking to Facebook’s clean lines and more professional appearance.

The jury is till out on Facebook’s viability as a pure marketing vehicle while their engineers refine their tools and features during this current wave of growth. Having learned from the growing pains that plagued MySpace, the Facebook team appears to be taking carefully measured steps.

DO:

• Keep it professional. This is an online, digital resume’ on steroids, so provide content, in the case of Facebook, that puts forward the face you want potential clients, colleagues, and employers to see.
• Be responsive. If someone in your community reaches out to you, reply thoughtfully, accurately and quickly. Even in a digital environment, first impressions count.
• Be consistent. If you’re going to put profiles in multiple places, assume the same people will see them all, and ensure that your information is consistent from one profile to the next.

DON’T

• Skip details. If you’re trying to foster business relationships on business networking sites, make sure your profile includes your complete work history, even those entry-level jobs. Some sites allow you to search by company, and former colleagues might want to contact you. They just might have job offers.
• Over embellish. Be accurate. Remember, while your former classmates and colleagues are a great source of referrals, if they see you promoted yourself or miraculously have an MBA, your credibility will be shot.
• Play the numbers game. The more people you are connected to on business networking sites, the shallower those relationships are likely to be. Recruiters may find value in linking to as many people as possible, but one executive says he feels that more than 150 contacts is too much.
• Forget about your profile. Revisit your profile and resume’ regularly to ensure your information is current and accurate.

Perhaps the most interesting opportunity on Facebook is its open invitation to developers who have ideas for applications that will benefit users in an online social environment. Facebook’s team has provided everything a developer needs to create an application that will integrate seamlessly into the existing Facebook platform. Applications have been developed for everything from marking a map with every place you’ve ever visited, to borrowing money from other Facebook users to providing personalized restaurant reviews.

The Where I’ve Been application appears as a world map on a user’s Facebook or MySpace profile page. The user highlights the countries he’s been to, lived in, or wants to go to. These personalized maps can be easily shared with friends.

“We’re encouraged by the fast adoption of our application as it serves a need for community building and travel exploration and is attractive to partners who are targeting the wide universe of travel customers,” said Chief strategic officer Brian Harniman.

Over one million users added the Where I’ve Been map to their profile within the first 30 days, with approximately 30,000 new users daily.

Superpages.com launched a Restaurant Reviews application for Facebook. The application allows Facebook users to read and write restaurant reviews, and allows others to learn more about the users’ favorite restaurants.

“Both local search and social networking are hot, so it makes sense to combine the two,” said Robyn Rose, vice president of marketing for Superpages.com. “Superpages.com continues to connect circles of trusted individuals through robust local search capabilities. We are excited to enable Facebook users with access to Superpages.com restaurant reviews while they are engaged with their social network.”

No one has felt the benefit of the Facebook phenomenon more keenly than a trio of Microsoft engineers from Seattle.
Facebook lets users "poke" one another, which is Internet-speak for reaching out and touching someone. So Nikil Gandhy, 24, William Liu, 26, and Jonathan Hsu, 28, dreamed up the "Super Poke."

In less than two weeks, a million Facebook users were virtually hugging, pinching, and head-butting their friends, even throwing sheep at them.
"We were astonished," Gandhy said. "I basically got no sleep trying to keep the servers up. Suddenly we hear people around us talking about Super Poke, our friends are calling us and asking if we made that application, and companies started contacting us."

Within a month, Slide bought Super Poke and gave the three engineers new jobs in San Francisco.

JP Morgan Chase began a campaign on social network Facebook to promote a credit card loyalty program. Chase rewards points to customers who join a Chase subgroup, sign up for and activate a credit card, and review advice on wise credit use. Students can redeem points for such items such as Twister, a George Forman grill, or Kraft Easy Mac Cups.

Customized Online Social Networks
When Intuit's customers need help with its Quicken software, sure they can call technical support, but the company is also hoping they'll learn to rely on each other. Intuit turned to LiveWorld to create an online community for Quicken support last year. Intuit says the community has flourished and that it's become an important branding tool. Today, members answer 70% of the posts and Intuit’s research department uses information gleaned from the community to improve its personal finance product.

MINI Cooper USA went with LiveWorld to create an online community of MINI Cooper owners, and every month 1,500-2,000 new owners of the auto become active in the community. Owners share photos and contribute tens of thousands of messages to online conversation threads each month. When Mini organized a cross-country rally, owners used the site’s message boards to coordinate meetings.

Master networkers who are trying to connect with other executives, potential partners, or customers don’t expect payback from every person right away. Instead, they set strategies that build relationships for the long haul. If somebody helps you, try to reciprocate. If you’re planning to build a customer network for branding or market research purposes, remember to share insights gleaned from these networks with participants. It helps keep them feeling important to your process and stay engaged. Businesses and customers alike are always looking for that personal touch.

Plugging your business into an online social network is an inexpensive, tech savvy springboard into the world of Internet self marketing. HBM

Don Lafferty is a writer, self marketing consultant and senior sales executive in the technology sector. His training programs, crafted for the 3M Corporation, Flextronics International, Avnet and others have strengthened the careers of thousands of sales people. To be Don's Friend, visit his MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/donlafferty.

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Give Your Business a Virtual Facelift
By Even Carmichael

When was the last time you wrote on somebody’s wall? We’re not talking about when you were five years old and you took crayons to your mother’s gleaming white living room walls. We’re talking about on Facebook, the Palo Alto-based online networking site that is taking the world by storm. If you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have an answer to that question, or if you don’t even know what that question means then your business is in trouble.

So says entrepreneurship expert Evan Carmichael, who has become a firm believer in the power of Facebook for businesses. “First of all, it’s simply a great way to connect in a much more community-oriented way.” Carmichael stresses the value of being able to join groups that are related to your business. “You can see who else has joined, send group messages, see or post relevant workshops and events, and so much more.”

Facebook also allows for a good opportunity to promote your company, suggests Carmichael. “You can update your status and post notes about new product developments that you’re working on next. You can post pictures of a new book you may be launching, or even advertise and sell your products in the Marketplace. You can also read other people’s updates to see if there may be room for collaboration or to lend your services.”

Once you make any changes to your profile, that information is automatically sent to all your friends’ news feeds. “So, in this sort of viral way, you can be slowly building your brand,” says Carmichael. Finally, there are those entrepreneurs who are discovering the value of Facebook applications, third-part mini-programs that can run on the site. “When your competitors start coming to you, you know you’re on to something.”

Evan Carmichael can be reached at evan@evancarmichael.com

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