Strategies, tools and tactics to help the people just getting started with Social Networking

If you practice any kind of awareness training, you already know the power of questions. However, what you’re probably missing is that you may be asking the wrong questions – without you knowing it! The following excerpt from Dr. Neil Postman, the celebrated Chair of the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University, superbly illustrates this:

“A question, even of the simplest kind, is not, and never can be unbiased. The structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as its content. The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate totally different answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question ‘Is it permissible to smoke while praying?’ and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one’s whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always permissible to pray.”

So what biases are you suffering from when you ask questions about networking? With your questions, what beliefs are you reinforcing?

I’ve been a member of Business Networking International (BNI), the world’s largest business networking organization, for 11 years. I have also been involved in Social Networking (SN) for the past four years. I see a remarkable synergy between both the offline and the online networking worlds. And yet I’m constantly amazed by the reluctance people from each world have about embracing the other world.

Here are a few of the questions I get asked during my presentations on combining online and offline networking to maximize results. Can you recognize the biases in them? What’s my return on investment (ROI) with networking? How much time do you waste driving to and from events? You have a big network online, but how many of those people do you REALLY know? You claim that I can triple the number of referrals I receive, but what about the quality of these referrals? With these questions do you start to see common “judgmental” threads?

Compare the questions above with these. How can I increase the odds that my social networking will yield a solid ROI? How can I maximize the time I will be investing at this event? How can I capitalize on the value I’ve built with my network? How can I educate my referral partners to receive better quality referrals?

Which set of questions is more likely to yield higher dividends?

Asking better questions is an essential skill in becoming a better communicator. It is also the key to discovery. A great place to start honing this skill is by being aware of our own biases. With awareness, we can purposely examine the biases and see if they are helping us achieve our goals. If they’re not, we can toss them and replace them with new questions that will.

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Debbra Sweet is a good friend of mine and a great marketing professional is giving away an Audio CD and some “How to” marketing videos she just made for women entrepreneurs. These are f’ree. The CD is full of her very best marketing secrets that produce results super fast.

The videos are online but the 77 min CD she has to send to you in the mail. Learn more about it and click here if you want to order yours.

She has a limited supply available so order yours now.

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Social Networking is all about building relationships. It is about gaining Visibility and earning Trust. Eventually this leads to sales. That’s the 40,000 foot view. I will now share with you an actual situation I had earlier this week so that you can see it in action.

I posted a Twitter update about me saving three lives as a result of donating blood. This was a personal tweet that had zero to do with business. One of my Twitter followers re-twitted the post. For those of you who don’t know how I found this out, I had set up Twitter alerts that automatically scan all tweets that contain my Twitter name.

I proceeded to thank her by sending a direct message via Twitter – it is a good practice to respond to communications from people who engage with you via the same channel. She responded back to me and we now had a conversation going. She mentioned to me that she was also checking out the QuoteActions email marketing system that I developed.

I then went to her website, found her phone number and called her. We had a nice chat and she mentioned to me that she had been following me for quite some and that she really enjoyed my QuoteActions tweets. She then asked me some questions about the QuoteActions system and I encouraged her to take the free trial. Which she did.

I just got a notification that she purchased a 1-year subscription to QuoteActions.

As you can see from the example, I first built my Visibility and then I gained my Credibility with her. I was building a relationship with her without me even knowing it. The relationship got closer when she came onto my radar because of her re-tweet of my post. And it is now at the point where she has become one of my customers.

So was there any particular action that led to this sale? No. It was a combination of ALL my activities that caused this result. And therein lies the power of Social Networking. No activity by itself in Social Networking will lead to success. However when you aggregate all of the activities together, they become a very powerful force.Malcolm Gladwell does a great job of explaining this in his book The Tipping Point.

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This is the title of an excellent post by Sean Nelson on the four types of strategies to use LinkedIn. Click here to read his post. After finishing, I would love to read which strategy you employ.

I started out as a Turtle, moved to a Hound Dog, thought about becoming a LION and finally settled on an Alley Cat. What about you?

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One of my LinkedIn contacts recently sent me a message about a free presentation he was offering to help people save money on insurance. I’ve met this fellow a couple of times and from our conversations, he seems to be quite knowledgeable about the subject of insurance. Seeing an opportunity to earn some Social Capital by helping him and possibly others in my network, I proceeded to send a Tweet inviting people to check out his presentation.

Subsequently I received another email from a different contact asking me how well I knew the person who was doing the presentation. I replied stating the above and also directing him to another member of my network who knew this person better and could give him a better idea about the presenter.

A few days later I received another email from the same person and he was rather upset because he felt that even though the content of the presentation was valuable, the way it was presented was disparaging of independent insurance brokers.

This got me thinking: how much responsibility should I bear for what happened here? And what should I do about it?

The way I see it, there is a big difference between recommending and informing. A recommendation is much more powerful than an announcement. And because it is more powerful, it carries with it more responsibility.

In this case, I was willing to make an announcement but I certainly wasn’t willing to make a recommendation. The reason I wasn’t willing to recommend was because I had no experience with the product and I also don’t yet know the person well enough to put my reputation behind him.

One thing I learned from this is that people may treat announcements as endorsements and I better make the difference clear. It also reinforced my perspective that there are always risks when you are connecting people. And that these risks come with the territory. If I want to position myself as a connector, then I have to deal with these situations.

I welcome your thoughts and opinions on this.

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I received an email earlier this week asking for my help to bring some visibility to the short video I’ve embedded below. When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the St. Vincent Medical Center, as well as offering free mammograms. All of this is part of a campaign to promote breast cancer awareness.

So after reading the rest of this post, please take 3 minutes to watch the video. You’ll both make a difference and have some fun at the same time. Feel free to use the ReTweet button here as well.

As far as Social Networking goes, this is a great example of it’s power. One of the things I love about Social Networking is experiencing the way networks work. A contact who lives in Minnesota whom I originally met on LinkedIn sent me the email. Our relationship has been growing and we’re at the stage where we are both helping each other. I’ve built enough trust with her that I’m willing to help her with this project. In the process I’m also able to indirectly help a whole bunch of others as well.

The skeptic out there will be saying – “that’s all great, but how does it help you generate more business?” The answer is a combination of facts and faith.

The fact is that I’m building Social Capital. Social Capital is a new kind of currency that you earn when you help others achieve their goals. When you do that, it is the equivalent of putting money into a savings account to be spent at a later date. By helping my contact, she is now much more likely to want to help me in return. Why? This is human nature. Do this hundreds or thousands of times with enough people and you can be building huge reserves of Social Capital. With these kind of reserves you can easily have people helping you earn more money.

The faith part is connected to the law of reciprocity. You get back what you put out there. Some people call it Karma. Whatever it’s name, you must have faith that it will work. Interestingly enough, this is a circular rather than a linear process. What I mean by this is that sometimes the reciprocity doesn’t come directly from the person(s) you originally helped. It comes from seemingly “out of nowhere.” Personally I have experienced many instances where help has come my way “out of nowhere.” Some people call it luck. I choose to attribute this to the law of reciprocity. That’s where faith comes in.

So please enjoy the video and earn a bit of Social Capital in the process.

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Many people attribute this to age. However I happen to disagree. There are many people in their 50’s – myself included – and older that get the power of Social Networking. The problem is not age but mindset.

Seth Godin, recently wrote a post where he says that the reason it is so hard for companies to understand and embrace Social Media, is because it is a process and not an event. Processes take time and they are harder to manage than events.

In the fast-paced world that we live in, the tendency is to focus more and more on events and less and less on processes. While events may be sexier and garner the headlines, remember what Aesop’s fable of the Turtle and the Hare taught us: slow and steady wins the race. Embrace the process!

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One of the three pillars of building an effective Social Networking strategy is increasing your credibility. When people trust you they will listen to you. So I’m always looking for ways to increase my credibility online.

ReallyWho.com can help you increase your credibility online. They have a pretty slick system that allows them to verify that you are indeed a real person with a real physical address. This greatly reduces the chances that spammers would use their service – since the last thing that they want is for people online to know their real name and/or location. As you can see from my picture below, they add a verify banner to your image that you can then place on your Social Media sites to increase people’s trust in you.

Remember that trust and credibility are built over time and in little increments. This is one step that will help you. I highly encourage that you at least check them out.

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Social Networking is all about building relationships. The way you build relationships is by using the VCP model – Visibility, Credibility & Profitability. You build Visibility over the long term by being consistently present. You build Credibility by consistently offering valuable items to others.

If you are going to succeed in Social Networking, you must be a giver first. So you must have a strategy for giving. Whether it is information, access, entertainment, joy, etc. you must consistently focus on giving something of value away. When you do this, people will notice and they will begin to engage in conversations with you. If you respond appropriately,these conversations will continue. And after they continue for a while, some of these conversations will turn into business for you.

Remember: there are no magic pills. There are no shortcuts. Slow and steady wins the race.

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