"People do business with people, not companies."
I was recently reminded of this phrase by womensDISH blogger Katja Presnal who had a fabulous post on Ladybug Landings demonstrating exactly how social networking can help you do business with people and not companies.
In her post, Katja talks about how we should focus our efforts on reaching out to our already established networks. In other words, blasting information out to as many people as possible and praying something sticks just doesn't work anymore. It's better to focus your energy on people who already know you.
This is definitely shades of Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers," a book written back in 1999 when most of us were just getting used to email, let alone the Internet. However, this concept rings even truer today because we are part of a global economy where the Internet is too crowded; the media sources too many; authenticity too rare; and on top of this, our lives are just too darn busy. This is where social networking comes in.
Katja writes:
The personal relationships matter in business, and with the social media tools people can easier find the people they want to do business. Social media sites also make referring people easy and finding business partners people who you already know recommend. The whole beauty of sites like Twitter is that you can easily jump into a conversation with people and get connected without even having to just talk business. When people know who you are as a person, they are more likely to do business with you.
She also gives a great example of this at play in business:
CASE STUDY: BLASTING TO MASSES VERSUS CONTACTING YOUR NETWORK
I was recently working with a project that needed bloggers’ participation and I needed to get 5-10 bloggers involved. I contacted 10 bloggers who already knew who I was, and 10 bloggers who didn’t know me, but who blogged in the target market I was looking for. Out the first group, of ten people who already knew me, nine said yes to the project. Out of the ten who didn’t know me, nobody said yes.
Out of 20 bloggers I contacted I got 9, that’s 45% return rate on the whole group, and 90% return rate on the group who already knew me. Sadly, in this example the return rate on the “shoot and pray” method was 0% - I wonder how many unknown to me bloggers I would have had to contact to get the 9 bloggers I needed for the project.
Katja Presnal
Click here to read Katja's full article.
So, how do you build a network of people so that you don't have to "shoot and pray?"
What I love about this question is that it brings us back to the whole reason we started the Downtown Women's Club over a decade ago. Back then, the question for us was not "how do we avoid the shoot and pray?" But "how do we make every cold call a warm one?" In essence, it's the same question; and this is why here at the DWC, we've developed some easy ways for you to build up your networks:
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