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 Social Networking Tips in Business
The hottest topic in the market is social networking and the vast number of ways it can be leveraged for your business. Pretty much every business involves asking questions or doing some sort of research to solve a problem or satisfy a need. From something as simple as a "what color do our customers prefer?" or to something a bit more complex like "do we charge prime-plus or prime-minus when booking inter-company loans to an offshore subsidiary?" The quality of people you need to talk to become more important when the questions become more complex or obscure. If the person with the right knowledge isn’t nearby, then you need to solicit an answer from outside and social networks can help you find the right person to ask.
Recruiting is all about finding the right person and this involves asking a lot of people a lot of questions. Social networks are useful tools because they can help map out relationships and this is important because the willingness of people to answer your questions is directly related to the level of trust you can establish with them. If you can establish a common acquaintance or friend, then that helps build the connection and it can lead to a more open discussion. In sales terminology, it can help change a cold call into a warm lead.
The other way social networks can add value is by helping you find and connect to the right people. For example, in recruiting, the best place to find good people is often at your direct competitors. By using social networks like Linkedin or Facebook, you can find the names of some people, and if you have a well developed network, you can see how you are linked to those people. As noted above, by leveraging these links you can change the cold calls to warm leads. This is not limited to recruiting and is just as useful in lead generation for sales. Using the same method, you can find out who in your network knows someone at your prime prospect and ask them to make an introduction.
Although social networks are new to most people, they have been around for a long time. They are just amped up, content-rich user forums. Years ago, techies used user forums to get help on coding date-algorithms as well as for dating-tips. This is a bit over simplified but the huge tech content was organized into knowledge bases and the dating content moved into chat rooms. These chat rooms and user forums were really just primitive social networks and they have been recruiting resources for over a decade.
Today, we are merely scratching the surface of the potential of social networks in business. In the future we will likely see more and more CRM and market intelligence software incorporate data from social networks. Because most information in social networks is user generated, it is easy to see the potential value of databases that regularly update themselves with hyper-current information. The concept is enough to make any business person drool at the possibilities. However, I suggest we wipe our chins and exhale. I trust that Drool 1.0 will be priced for the Fortune 500 and it will be a while before it is accessible to us common folk.
For more on social networks in recruiting, please click to see the slide presentation.
By Tim Swanson, Corporate Recruiters Ltd. Tim can be reached at: tim@corporate.bc.ca
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