Some of you may have attended my talk yesterday with the Columbus Business First and Sparkspace Social Media Summer Camp series. Thank you! I hope you at least took away a few ideas you can apply to your networking on LinkedIn.
I’ve included the video of the presentation below in case you want to share it with folks around the office. Warning – the presentation is over an hour long. You might want to grab a beer (or coffee depending on your office culture;)) before pushing play. Either way, enjoy, steal ideas, try things out, and if you have questions, you can always find me on Twitter. I’m happy to help.
(Disclosure: this is not shameless self promotion. People have actually asked for the video.)
Timing is everything
Bryan forwarded this article from BtoB magazine to my attention today.
Side thought – I’m so happy to be working around other people again. Working from home is rough. I spent four months bouncing ideas around with two dogs, three cats, a gold fish and the occasional lunch crowed at my local Panara. Productive information sharing was becoming a challenge.
Back to the article and Business to Business marketing. I found this excerpt interesting (and fairly relevant to my talk):
Asked about specific social media networks they currently use, an overwhelming 81% of b-to-b marketers cited LinkedIn, compared with just 25% of the b-to-c marketers. Interestingly, microblogging service Twitter ranked higher among b-to-b (70%) than b-to-c (46%) respondents. Facebook is the most-used social media site overall (74%), and enjoys high use among b-to-b marketers (60%).
Why, you ask? These stats show something I think is very important in regards to social branding. Our personal social brands are made up of more than what we do for a living. On it’s own, LinkedIn is a niche social community (albeit a very large niche community) focused on enhancing the way we do business. Facebook on the other hand is seen by most users as a tool to connect you with your “personal” network of friends.
So I ask, do you not form friendships with your customers? Would you agree that establishing know, like and trust is critical to a good business relationship? If you don’t connect with people personally, can you really build that kind of a relationship?
Interestingly enough the survey shows fairly heavy Facebook usage as a tool for BtoB marketing. I myself was a little surprised by the results.
The Learning
Your personal and professional social brands are translated online by the media you use to engage your communities. That said, we are all more than just what we do for a living, don’t you think?
Can Facebook be used to network for business? Apparently a good amount of BtoB marketers asked in this study seem to think so. Do you have any thoughts on using Facebook as a business tool?
Here’s the video. Enjoy.
Columbus Busienss First Social Media Summer Camp – Strategy Based LinkedIn, Presneted by Nate Riggs from Nate Riggs on Vimeo.
Join The Discussion!