Social networking sites suck for business

Funny claim in a Harvard Business School online forum, where Paul Michelman claims “why I'm dropping you as a Facebook Friend” due to his lack of being able to make real business connections via Facebook. Thus he proclaims, “I'm ready to sever my ‘business’ ties and limit my Facebook use to exclusively personal correspondence. Not only will it keep out a lot of noise, but it will solve another pressing problem: keeping my inappropriate friends, and the even more inappropriate friends of friends, at a safer distance from my professional associates.”

Facebook really is, as it claim to fame signifies, one of the largest “social networking” sites. You would expect then, that most people who inhabit that site are there for mostly social reasons.

But there has been a trend recently, to use Web 2.0 social networking tools for business related networking, and one of the most popular and one which I use regularly is LinkedIn. Like anything else, after the initial excitement of meeting business contacts you have not seen in a while, you start adding lots of contacts after which you start to question whether any of it is worthwhile. As another blogger Ann All states:

I had dinner with a friend the other night, a busy and successful freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the restaurant and food industry. We were talking about networking sites, and he admitted, “I’ve got 100 people in my LinkedIn network, but I don’t know what to do with them.” Another editor here tried using LinkedIn to round up sources for a story she was working on. Most of the suggestions turned out to be dead ends. She got some interesting leads, though few related to the story in question.

Earlier in her blog, she alluded to the fact that this experience is no different than when she attends trades shows or conferences, she can leave with handfuls of business cards, only to throw away most of them. I’ve experience similar things, but unlike the expectations of the authors above, I had no illusions that joining a site like LinkedIn would provide lots of quality connections, or any real quality connections for that matter.

But it’s like anything else in life, the amount of genuine effort you put into something will generally provide a genuine return back. From my own observations, most people I see put up a shallow profile and just try to add as many connections as possible. I think there are 4 effective ways to use an online business networking site:

1. If its mainly business contacts you are looking for, then join a business only networking site and think carefully how you will set up your profile and the image you want to portray. The better the image is that aligns to what you do and offer, the better the chances are that someone or company will contact you looking for a fit. Its all part of that “Personal Branding” thing.
2. You will need to engage actively in the site. For example, LinkedIn has a Q&A section where you can pose questions categorized by industry interest, and again, you will need to give thoughtful, well articulated and genuine answers and pose relevant and timely questions so that people both in and outside your network become responsive.
3. LinkedIn and especially other networking sites such as Plaxo have an aggregating feature, where you can link your other online presences such as blogs, business websites, etc. to it, that will be effective in both directing others to informative and interesting sites and links to learn more about you, and those sites and links can direct people back to your social networking site.
4. If you meet a potential business contact offline, follow up and link to them online and visa versa. Then follow up.

But even if you were to do this regularly, I do realize that it will be on rare occasions that you will meet that quality business contact. It's just the way it is, and is very similar to the mass mailing advertisements that I used to do when I owned a retail business. The ROI on those were typical less than 1%, but the hope was that of that 1%, you would acquire a few high quality customers who would become future long term customers. In addition, there was a common held notion that it takes on average, about 10-15 exposures by a potential customer such that the next time they need some service or product provided by you, that they'll think of visiting your establishment.

My feeling is that this personal banding of yourself via business networking sites is of a similar ROI, and at least anecdotally, my return has followed a similar pattern I experienced running my retail business. The main difference between the two, was that for retail marketing it was mostly a matter of cost (how much and how often was I willing to pay to do mass mailing), whereas with personal business branding, it is really a matter of time (how much and how often am I willing to participate online). But all in all and as they say, the principles of marketing remain the same... you gotta do it and you gotta do it often.

But I would also like to add that your results will vary.