How to put the "Social" & "Networking" back into Social Networking.
Posted by Dale Berkebile on Tue, Oct 06, 2009
So this morning started out as every day and then something different happened. Last night I did a Social Networking presentation to the business startup group of a local FastTrac class. After telling the class about trying different ways to use "Twitter search" in order to find new people to follow, I thought I might get back to doing this from time to time.
In the past, I have used this tool to find others to follow and it has helped me build my own following. One of the main themes though in last night presentation was the need to actually become "social" and start "networking" on all the social media sites I mentioned. I feel Brandwise has done a pretty good job at this, but than this mornings incident turned our thoughts on their ear.
Basically, I did a search for "branding". One of the tweets that came up was "@ We frequently hide behind websites, blogs, branding, etc but ultimately if people don't like you as a person, you're doomed." by @debsylee. This tweet struck me as interesting so I thought I would do what we typically do, retweet our thoughts on this topic. This is what we posted - "@
this is so true. People only do business with people they know, like
and trust and it takes a lot of marketing to overcome this."
Well, to make a long story short, I realised that Deborah had begun following me and after about 9 tweets back and forth discussing this topic Deborah tweets "Thank you @ ... hasn't this just been a shining example of how a solid connection can be formed? No blogs, no buzzy marketeering..".
My point here is this… through this act of being social that only towards the end started becoming networking, I have a strong sense of who this person is and what she does. I have a new respect for this person that I only found a few hours ago. Now that we hit it off, there could be a good chance we use her to do invitation design for clients and/or friends. This only happened because we took the time to share interesting content, were open to talk to new people and willing to network in a new format. This is what Social Networking is all about. Thanks Deborah Lee for helping me take the next step in social media. To see samples of Deborah's great work check it out here - Stylish Group.
To see more of the details on how this relationship progressed, follow us on Twitter and check out this mornings tweets at our Brandwise twitter account.
Happy networking!
