In many ways, doing business is far more complex than it was just a decade ago. eCommerce has come a long way, but so has the rest of the online world, which makes lead generation, customer interaction and marketing all much easier, but also potentially much more time consuming (and transparent, which can be both good and bad). It seems that there’s always a new social network du jour, or some web service that comes out of nowhere and instantly becomes a popular tool for online business activities. In a technological environment like such as we have, it’s no surprise that many businesspeople are overwhelmed with all the various digital-age business tools and either participate to a very small extent, or simply use more traditional tools thereby missing out on some great opportunities.
Generally, there are 2 ways for a business to benefit from participation with various websites and services: Either actively or passively. While the current trend in most online business activities points to increased active participation in social media and interactive networks, there’s still a lot of benefit to be had with simple SEO-style involvement.
On the passive side specifically, joining industry groups and associations often generates quality links back to a website, but they also provide a great facility for business networking and, of course, are an additional place for products and services to be found by potential customers. Also, be aware that there are 2 levels of associations a business can be represented by; industry-level which relates to the business and its activities, and professional level, which relates only to the company’s individual employees.
Beyond just getting some links and trying for brand and/or name recognition, the modern world of social media is wide open to businesses of all kinds. Creating profiles with popular services like
LinkedIn,
Facebook, and
Twitter is really quite easy to do and is often well worth the effort. Of course, just signing up won’t do much good, but even minimal participation is better than nothing. For the forward-looking businesses, though, advanced social media services such as
Ning even offer the ability to create a free and custom social network where every aspect can be controlled by the creators. This allows for perfectly tailored interaction with customers and prospects, using a platform that more people would be likely to use than a proprietary website.
Ultimately, all these tools are merely a means to an end for the business person. They don’t
manage reputations automatically or bring in leads by themselves, but the benefits of the publicity they can bring to a company are undeniable. Sometimes they can be a bit overwhelming, especially when there are multiple services to get set up on, but in the end, various kinds of social networking are the way business has always been done; these new tools simply make it accessible to just about everyone on Earth.
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Tags: Business, SEO, Social Media, Web 2.0
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on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under Tips.
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