Image by tanakawho

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” –Albert Einstein

In our last post we talked about Contact Adhesion in Social Networking. The idea was that the greater your level of contact adhesion with a particular online contact, the greater the chances that that contact will take part in your next online promotion. In this post we are going to outline two different methods for building contact adhesion.

The first method If going to describe is the less powerful of the two, but I’m going to list it first since it has the ability to help with the second method. Horizontal Contact Adhesion refers to connecting with a particular contact across several different social networking sites. This is the kind of networking we discussed in our post, “5 Ways Linkedin Can Help Grow your Business”, and it has two distinct benefits.

(more…)

Image by Cristiano Betta

A Related Example from Banking

In banking circles you’ll often hear marketing VPs talk about household penetration. The concept refers to the number of the bank’s products and services that a given household currently has. One of the ongoing goals, from the banks point of view is to increase household penetration.

The idea works something like this, if the bank can sell you on opening a safe deposit box, they know that even if they don’t make any upfront money on the rental of the box, that they have still done themselves a service.

Why is this the case? Because they know that the average safe deposit box holder visits the bank with much greater frequency then someone without a box. Every time they can get someone to set foot inside the bank is another chance for a customer service rep to sell them on whatever the product the bank is featuring that month.

(more…)

Earlier this week I read a blog post entitled “50 Of The Most Powerful And Influential Women In Social Media” by Lisa Weinberger. In her post, Lisa talks a lot about trying to get others in the online business community to use social media to help grow their business as well as the level of resistance she has received in doing so.

As Lisa puts it, “Social Media is very important and whenever I meet online business owners in person, I continually ‘preach’ to them that they MUST start getting involved in Social Media and they just laugh at me.”

This notion struck me since I’ve also encountered resistance in my attempts to spread the word about the benefits of social media. This made me wonder why many have such a hard time being proactive and exploring new avenues of growth for their businesses.

(more…)

In the spirit of our last two posts, we are going to stick to the topic of networking for today. In this post we are examining the value of attending face-to face networking events. Aside from being an enormously powerful network building tool, these types of meet ups are becoming increasingly easy to find.

From the popular “Tweet-Up” were Twitter users in the same geographical area decide to meet up, to one of the hundreds of groups that use sites like MeetUp.com as a portal to connect with others, the seems to be no shortage of options for meeting others with business interests similar to your own.

In his article “The Power of Real Life Interactions as a Blogger” on Problogger.net, Darren Rowse talks about the value of face-to-face meet ups. As he puts it, “many of those that I met in these face to face meet ups… have become quite good friends.”

In the Little Black Book of Connections, by Jeffery Gitomer, the author suggests that “All things being equal people want to do business with their friends”.

If we combine these two ideas together we come to an interesting conclusion. Since most people seem to be more comfortable doing business with those they consider friends, it makes sense that a friend with similar business intrests should be more valuable, as a networking contact, then a casual connection.

Combine this with the fact that face-to-face meet ups carry with them the power to transform causal online contacts into friendships, then it seems to follow that meet ups have an enormous potential to build the size and leverage of your network.

I have been trying to get to more meet ups, most recently by interacting with members of the “DC New Media Technology” which meets around Washington D.C. just 15 minutes away from where I live.

What are your experiences with face-to-face meet ups? We would love to hear from you in our comments section.

Image by foundphotoslj’s

Let’s start by considering how much a single Linkedin connection is worth to your business. Obviously if you connect with a mover and shaker in your industry, that connection will be worth more then your average connection.

So how much in terms of dollars and cents is the average connection worth to you? If we are talking about a single connection, then on average, probably not much. A single connection amounts to little more than a drop in the bucket.

A thousand connections on the other hand amounts to having the whole bucket. With such a large connection list, you will have attained critical mass.At this point, your proflie will have its own gravity, and others will be attracted to that gravity.

(more…)