C’mon now – get your mind out of the gutter. What I’m talking about in this article is why networking is not only socially rewarding, but it raises the personal brand of the networker. After all, would you rather buy insurance from the friend of your friend or from someone you’d never laid eyes on before? For most people, the answer is obvious: a personal referral is preferred.
It’s easy enough to create a Facebook page and Twitter feed that promotes your business activities.
You can endlessly update your network on LinkedIn, trading connections with people that you may only know very peripherally, if at all. But is that really the best use of your time?
Social networking can be so time-consuming that it’s probably best left to the celebrity with nothing else to do between gigs and/or arrests. The business user might find herself doing nothing but updating statuses and telling your Twitter followers for the thousandth time how wonderful you company’s new cat wax is.
Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time and effort getting you and your company genuinely involved in activities that are socially relevant? If you own a bar, carve out a night a month where all the profits go to benefit a worthy cause in your area and promote the heck out of it and then, cover it with social media. This is real networking that benefits your community and your business. Folks in advertising and design understand this and have been using PSAs and similar socially-beneficial pro bono work to both fatten the portfolio and display their sense of social relevance for decades. For the solo design practitioner, this can mean something as simple doing design work for a local favourite charity and then promoting both the fact that the designer did good work for the charity, but that the work they did was good from a design standpoint as well. It’s an investment of time that pays back in many ways.
To engage the customer more completely, one must involve their peripheral concerns as well. Tom’s Shoes, for example, makes some very nice shoes and they sell quite a lot of them. There are plenty of shoe companies out there, so what’s their deal? Well, for every pair of shoes purchased, they will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. So, there’s not only value in the product itself, but Tom’s leverages the customer’s purchase decision to appeal to the customer’s social concerns. Clever, right? Sure, but also socially beneficial. The company makes this feature a central tenet of their operation and they use the result, that is, shoes for kids in need, in every promotion vector, from print to the web. It’s win-win for everyone, especially for shoeless kids and entirely performance-driven.
So, how can this work for those of us in the cat wax business? Give a can of cat wax to needy cat owners for every gallon sold? Well, maybe, but the idea should be that the “give-back” is socially relevant while tying into what you do in some credible way. Imagine this scenario: your company cuts down trees and, for every tree felled, you have the property owner donate the wood to heat the home of a needy family. And indirect connection would be to market the wood and have the proceeds go to your local food co-op, or to funding the local senior centre, so that you’re hitting your company’s typical demographic and benefiting the community at the same time.
Keep in mind, though, that there is a line between promotion and exploitation that needs respect. Cross it and you will find that the internet has no mercy.
For more reading, see Carol Carter’s article at allbusiness.com by following this link.
