How To Have Success in Business – Treat Social Media Like a Cocktail Party & Watch Your Business Thrive!

BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF – Do you feel as if your networking and social media marketing skills are coming up a few hairs shy of success for your online business?

Strategic social networking is a must for running any successful online business.

There is a way to boost your networking skills in the social media venues and start thriving in business…

Stop posting your Can’t Live Without opportunity and start connecting with people.

Social Media and the Web of Interaction

To begin, lets take a step backwards for a moment and ask ourselves, what is social media?

Social media is the various media that people use to communicate online in a social way. Social media can include blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing and much more.

The subset of social media is social networking, a term used to refer how people interact on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and others.

Social networking occurs when a person creates a personal profile and interacts within the community of friends and like-minded people to share information.

Social Media is ONE Big Cocktail Party

If you can think of the web as a big city, then think of social media as the ways that people interact on blogs, forums and the social networking sites, such as bars, private clubs, and cocktail parties in the city.

In this case, an analogy for Twitter can be seen as what happens when girls go to the ladies’ room and talk about the guys, while the guys are discussing the girls while they wait.

Viewing the web as a big city where social media are the places that people congregate to have fun will help us make sense of how marketers can best use the tools of social media.

To help people understand the errs of their ways, how do you act at a cocktail party type of situation?

• Do you go into the large room filled with people you don’t know and shout, “BUY MY PRODUCT!”?
• Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a business card before you speak to them?
• Do you listen more than you speak?
• Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no expectation of getting something in return?
• Do you try to meet every single person, or do you have a few great conversations?
• Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties altogether because you are uncomfortable in such situations?

These would be great questions to help those people who are new to social media.

This would also be a good discussion with the social media cynics and those who cannot seem to see the value of this important form of communication.

Using the ‘Web as a City’ approach is especially important when dealing with those people who have been steeped into the traditions of advertising-based marketing… you know those people that plaster their can’t live without product or amazing money-making opportunity in every Facebook group available.

Sure, you can go to a cocktail party and treat everyone as a sales lead while babbling on about the fantastic opportunity you can provide to them.

OR, you can ask yourself this… do you think that approach is going to make you very popular?

The Importance of Social Engagement Through Networking

The popular people on the cocktail circuits make friends.

If you’ve been following anything I’ve been writing, you will know that I preach, “People Don’t Join a Business – they Join You!”

People like to do business with people they like. And they are eager to introduce their friends to each other.

The same trends hold true in social media, so go ahead and join the party.

But, think of it as just that – a fun place where you give more than you get.

Of course you can do business there, but the kind you do at a cocktail party and not at a General Store.

What you get in return for your valuable interactions are lasting friendships, many of which will lead to business opportunities.

NOTE: Many of these thoughts and excerpts were taken from the brilliant mind of David Meerman Scott and his book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”.

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Tags: Making Money Online Marketing Social Media Marketing Social Networking