- Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr
Activities and participation on the social web following Social Media Academy’s NCP Model.
To be or not to be… on a social network by loriruff in Ask an Expert, LinkedIn, Social Media
In regards to conversation about whether someone needed to invest his time (gain ROI) by participating in the LinkedIn community since he had such a strong referral network.
Lori, I had a similar conversation with a professional who got top notch referrals. We had almost concluded that it wasn’t worth his time, when I asked him if he thought that his contacts would always be at their present jobs, or firms. Would they be smart enough to leave with their outlook contacts? Have you ever left a job, only to begin the long process of re-entering business contacts from collected cards.
As an online location to collect your business associates, that allows the contact to updates his data, Linkedin can’t be beat. Even if you do the bare minimum and you don’t need people to find you – it helps you have emails and contact data for your best contacts. The result was he had never thought about it this way. And no, he had not recently backed up his outlook files. He also tossed business cards after his assistant added them to Outlook. He ended up creating a profile and had his admin, start sending invites so he could have a backup, web based location at the least.
Although there are several online contact databases, none have the added functionality of LinkedIn. Perhaps your contact should reconsider his profile on LinkedIn?
Using Social Media for B2B Marketing.
Linkedin Questions, Ellen Martin, Receptionist at Campbell & Chadwick PC
Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word of Mouth and Buzz Innovators Group
In regards to a question on how can you can use social media to find and develop business contacts into clients for a professional services firm?
Ellen,
First understand the business goals of your firm, then do an assessment of the social ecosystem to see where the possible customers are and what they are talking about. Build a strategy and action
plan after getting an understanding of the spaces and issues. Only then can you figure out how to solve the problem, build a action plan and then select the right tools. You may find that customer support is the best place to use social media that leads to leads for your firm. Hitting marketing and sales too early without a clear understanding of how to participate in the social web can backfire on you.
Other steps would be part of the action plan along with resource allocation – time, personnel and budgets.
COMMERCIAL OVER-POSTING IS PROHIBITED, PERIOD!
Linkedin Group Social Media Marketing (with over 50,000 members)
In regards to Mike Crosson vigilant policing of spammers in the group. His policy is clear and I have included it in this post since I think it has great value for other group managers.
From Mike Crosson: Hello, everyone – there have been a number of people who have ignored the clear directive that spam and straight commercial messages are NOT appropriate for this forum. I have warned these people and banned two from the list as a result. Here are the simple common sense rules so that everyone gets real value out of our Social Media Marketing group:
1. You can post something you feel will benefit the group, even if it is somewhat self-serving or has reasonable costs associated with it. There will undoubtedly be a number of people who might
your product or service beneficial. What you CANNOT do is post the same thing over and over. That becomes spam and benefits no one.
2. Try to provide something of VALUE in every posting – a resource you have or found, a relevant article to a discussion, a presentation or research that is useful.
3. Be transparent and honest – a lot of very smart people are in this group and can see through flimsy or sales-y materials. We all benefit from sharing knowledge and resources, and respecting the value of people’s time.
Here’s to 2009, a great year for our business!
Cheers,
Mike Crosson
Here is my reply:
I have used this group and your techniques as a moderator on more than one occasion to showcase a great moderator and the type of group that is worthwhile. I have used your suggestion to keep the same spammer out of two other groups I participate in. Feels like a blog topic coming on.
However, face it, people have spammed email forever and continue to do it in spite of software to reduce it. So I am afraid that spamming social media is here to stay. In fact it chokes up Twitter all the time.
That doesn’t mean we should stop these efforts and we need to continually remind ourselves and new users in our social ecosystems what is consider good and bad form and what we will allow in our groups that we can control.
Take out the light sabers and may the force be with us!
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