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‘Social Networking’ Category

  1. Engaged, content & shouting from the rooftops

    February 14, 2011 by Lesley

    Today is Valentines Day and partnerships are being created, celebrated and strengthened by acts of love, gifts, messages and more.

    I have been thinking about the values we put on relationships.  A marriage for example  brings happiness and stability to individuals, to families and to communities. But marriage, like anything else needs good care and maintenance if it is to last.

    In many places today some 40% or more of all marriages end in divorce. Is this because marriage is out of date? Could it be perhaps that marriages fail because the arrangement itself is faulty?

    A marriage deserves priority and only by sharing can people grow together.  A person who is primarily concerned with what he or she is getting from the marriage will never be truly happy, even if that individual remarries several times. In all honesty I think a marriage works only when each partner focuses more on giving than receiving.  As we grow our needs change,  to be able to adapt and to understand what our partner needs, feels or wants, is fundamental to a sustainable relationship.

    Why should relationships in business be any different?

    A person who feels they aren’t valued or important may move on, have an affair or file for divorce. They will probably confide in their closest friends and tell others of their bad experience.

    Online and social media give us the opportunity to learn what our customers prefer and want, and we are able to have conversations with them. By talking to them and asking questions we are taking an interest in them. They feel valued, important and involved.

    Rather than blasting marketing messages at them, and acting in a ‘controlling’ way, find out what they want and prefer to read and see. Work at the relationship, invest time in understanding your audience.

    A bit like a square peg in a round hole, old school marketing techniques don’t fit in a social space. Try not to see the likes of Twitter and Facebook as just another marketing tool, but as a way of getting to know your audience, serving your customers and developing customer loyalty.

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    Category B2C, Customer Service, Small Business, Social Media, Social Networking, new media | Tags: | 6 Comments

  2. The Jungle VIP

    September 23, 2010 by Lesley

    So many people do such great things to help worthy causes, and Ian Hamblin is no exception!!

    Please help me to get him the support and donations he needs

    ***********

    My eyes lit up when I saw the challenge. 6 days trekking through the rugged and no doubt sweltering humidity of the Thailand Jungles. Diabetes UK had sent me news of the challenge via their regular email updates and it wasn’t long before I was excitedly signing up to take part in this tough trek through a country I knew little about.

    That’s how I set about the daunting task of raising nearly £3,000 for Diabetes UK so that I could take my place on the expedition. But this brought me to the 2nd challenge. Raising the money! I was very excited about what I was taking on but also wary of the massive challenge I was facing.

    After a few months of trying a few things to raise the money it was clear that simply asking for donations was not working. For one thing, it was putting me in the role of a taker, which was not only ineffective at raising the funds, it didn’t particularly feel good to have my hand constantly held out towards other people. I then stumbled upon the obvious conclusion.

    The best way to receive anything is to give first!

    It seems like an obvious statement, but when we want something how many of us automatically put our hands out? We’ve all done it and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Just human nature i’m afraid!

    A little while after this insight, I got talking to a friend about the fact I was raising money for charity and he jokingly suggested we should abseil down the nearest building as batman and robin. After giggling away to myself for a moment, I realised it was actually a damn good idea. And after spreading the idea around a few friends on Facebook, it was clear that there were quite a few other friends who were very keen to join in the abseiling. I think i had about 15 people very interested in a few hours.

    Image courtesy of jf01350

    I had my action plan. I could give people an amazing life experience and at the same time ask them to help me raise funds in the process. I quickly sought out a company to organise the abseiling and set about finding a building to do it from. I created the www.newcastleabseil.com website to promote the event and keep people updated.

    At the time of writing this, I still have a bit to go until I (and hopefully many others) throw themselves off the side of a building for a good cause, but I’m enjoying every step and obstacle as it comes along. There have been days where my enthusiasm began to wane, but it wouldn’t take long before someone would ask “Hey Ian. How’s the abseiling coming along?” and my enthusiasm would be renewed as I told them about where I was.

    Without other people around me I’d have given up or moved on to something else long ago. It’s other people’s enthusiasm that has helped me to keep going, especially when I was working on the project late on a Friday night, when I wanted t to be relaxing!

    Image courtesy of  jf01350

    But the biggest thing I’ve learned is the false belief that it doesn’t mean anything unless you do it all yourself. Even top athletes have teams of 50+ people helping them to get the gold. Getting as many people involved in my project has been the best thing about it. I simply can’t wait to have a an amazing time scaring myself to death along with some amazing people and hopefully raise a lot of money in the process. And with it, we’ll get George back to the jungle where he belongs!

    Ian Hamlin

    ************

    Please donate by clicking here and make this happen!

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    Category Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized | Tags: ,, | 14 Comments

  3. Paws for Thought

    September 22, 2010 by Lesley

    I spoke to a friend yesterday on the phone. We talked about the speech I gave last week at the Mid Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Network Lunch. My friend was full of praise for how I had delivered this, and said I had included some valid points.

    My friend still wanted to know how he could win business through Social Media engagement.

    Ok, let’s strip back some layers……

    Image courtesy of sunshinecity

    A cliché, I know, but people do business with people.

    When we go to networking events we ‘wear’ our business like a suit. We know that each one of us is there for business. We all try to impress and leave others with a lasting opinion. These are corporate events and we get the opportunity to talk about our business through a brief elevator pitch. Even when we mingle and network afterwards we ask and talk about business.

    So, we hear about someone’s business first.

    I think back to the days when I would receive numerous cold-calls a day. People trying to pitch at me with great offers and must have products. I have said it before, I will say it again – people only buy what they want, when they want and from whom they want. So when I am approached by someone wanting to sell me something, I automatically and instinctively re-coil and my defence mechanism kicks in. It’s the same for us all.

    Engaging socially means we can develop a relationship with others first before business enters the game. A lot of people see this as recreational (which it is) and as a result do not see it as a serious option. The biggest challenge to me is convincing people that building relationships socially will pay off in the end.

    Let’s look at the chain reaction of social networking…….

    I talk to Laura on Twitter and we share some common ground – cats. Laura began looking for a kitten some time back which coincided with our cat having given birth to 6 cuties. Laura lived a little too far away to be able to take one of my kittens, but she told her friend Helen about them. Helen lived a little closer to me than Laura, some 45 minutes drive,  and she agreed to come over and pick a couple of them up.

    Ok, so here my online friendship with Helen turned into an offline meeting. Priceless.

    Helen and I caught up a few times on the phone afterwards, exchanging humorous stories of the naughty kittens and their antics. Business crept into the conversation, naturally, and it became apparent that we shared a mutual contact. Someone I had met briefly over a crowded room at #learnpod10 when Chris Brogan was in the UK earlier this year. I connected with TweetsbySkeet too.

    Through my initial friendship with Laura I had now met two more people and by conversing with them I became visible to their network of friends too. This opened up a combined network of 3,801 new people to me.

    I got asked to guest blog, I discussed the possibility of holding some Social Media workshops in a new area and was invited to a couple of events……all because my cat had kittens!

    Getting to know people with some common ground, other than business interests, puts us at ease. We can really get to know what makes the other person ‘tick’. Business flows naturally without the need to force it on others. We become visible immediately to the networks of those we be-friend – something we cannot do offline. For me to make myself known to 3,801 people offline would take a lot of time, and perhaps a lot of money.

    Is networking socially a waste of time? No.

    Leave your business ‘suit’ behind, put on a ‘virtual’ pair of comfy jeans and interact. The more you interact, the more opportunities will come your way, the more visibility you will achieve.

    What do you think? Do you ‘hunt’ business, or ‘gather’ relationships?

    Please leave a comment below……

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    Category B2B, Social Media, Social Networking | Tags: , | 16 Comments

  4. Adding Good Value

    September 15, 2010 by Lesley

    Here is a great article written by my new found friend Scott Kurland from Ribbonbook. I am sure, once you have read this, you will be inspired and you will want to learn more…..

    Great people doing great things – I wish Scott all the very best – help me support him?


    Add Good Value

    I want to thank Lesley for inviting me to guest blog.  It’s such an honor to be featured on Conversation Matters, and I am a big fan of Lesley’s mission to “Humanise” (we spell it “Humanize” in the US) business.

    My new business, Ribbonbook, seeks to humanize the online greeting card business

    I learned this lesson the hard way by failing at businesses where I pretended to be big, successful, or perfect. Now I’m human.  Just a struggling guy trying his best to bring something great to the world, and meeting a lot of great people along the way.

    A little about me… I’ve always been an entrepreneur, but with varying success over the years (including lately).  One of the issues that I kept running into was the feeling that in order to be successful, I needed to have mass appeal… and be cheaper than my competitors, so that people would buy from me.  This is a tough game, because it can quickly turn into a competition where you lose.  You just can’t compete on Amazon selling things that huge companies can get much cheaper than you can.  You just end up spending a lot of time and effort for zero profit.

    People demand low prices for just about everything they buy, especially in this economy… so it took me a long time before I realized that I could just stop playing that game, and play another one instead.  I could add something both my customers and I care about as a unique value add feature, and change the conversation from price to value.

    By having “helping people” as a social value “feature” of RibbonBook, I can create a community of people who care about doing something good.  If you want to buy your greeting cards at Walmart (or maybe Asda in the UK), that’s fine.  But if you care about joining a community of like-minded people who care about helping people, you might pay a few cents more to buy a RibbonBook card.  Don’t care about helping?  No problem.  Walmart is right down the street.

    The great part about this approach is that your customers are self-selecting, and you get the ones you want.  Why would I want to sell RibbonBook cards to everyone, when I could make sure that my best customers were also the very best people?  People that I’d want to know, and have a relationship with, because we have something is common.  We like to help people.

    The truth is, if you see RibbonBook and still want to buy your cards at Walmart, you probably aren’t the kind of customer I want anyway.

    I’ve been getting great feedback with this approach, and I’m very optimistic about launching RibbonBook on December 1, 2010!  It’s so enjoyable and liberating to work on something that means something to other people and to yourself.

    Whole foods markets find “whole” customers.  Green energy companies find “green” customers.  They don’t get all the customers, or even the majority… but they get the ones they want… the ones that matter.

    Can you add “good value” as a feature of your product or service, and then find passionate, self-selecting customers that you’d actually be proud to say that you know?  I’ll bet you’d be a lot happier…  I know I am.
    –Scott


    Scott Kurland

    Founder, RibbonBook

    Send Cards. Give Ribbons. Help People.

    http://www.ribbonbook.com

    Twitter @ribbonbook

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    Category B2B, B2C, Social Media, Social Networking | Tags: , | 12 Comments

  5. Tweet Charity

    September 8, 2010 by Lesley

    Continuing my series of articles by guest writers who use Twitter for great causes, to inform and create awareness, today’s blog is by Iain – a man who’s passion lies in creating awareness and support for our UK Charities.

    It’s a journey through Twitterverse

    Enjoy!!

    TweeetCharity

    After using Care2.com for 10 years to gain new friends and to tell people about my passion for tiger and Big Cat conservation I became aware of Twitter, a large group of users around the world who spoke to each other in sentences of 140 characters per message or less using the internet.

    Gradually I lost interest in Care2.com and became more aware of the greater potential that Twitter had for me and how it could help to get my message out to a wider audience.

    Care2.com has a massive user base in America but is not so well known in the UK and Europe and this is where I wanted to get a new following, so, Care2 was abandoned after 10 years and all my efforts went into Twitter.

    The strangest thing that happened was that my personal love of Big Cat conservation never made it onto Twitter but, my love of volunteering and fundraising for charities did.

    So, what do I call myself? That was a problem for quite awhile. I started with @iainmcooke which being my name wasn’t too difficult but that Twitter profile was just about me which I thought would probably bore people to death. So I had to come up with a Twitter name that I could use to connect with my love of charities. I liked the idea of using *tweet* but at that time it wasn’t allowed so I used three ‘e’s’ instead of two and added a word that rhymed with tweet and @TweeetStreet was born.

    This was 18 months ago and at first I was interested solely in a large amount of Twitter followers, the more the merrier! But this is really not a good idea if you wish to stay on Twitter for a long while (ie years). I used applications that give you lots of followers but they were not suitable or of any use to me. Un-following these people took hours and I

    realised that I had wasted my time with those applications. I needed quality not quantity so I decided to target people by using Twitters search engine. I also tried Tweetdeck which offered more accurate results and I started to pick people out who had an interest in either a particular charity / help site or charity work in general.

    The first year was very slow, progress wise. It is easy to stay within your own network of friends never gaining more than a handful of followers each week. So I developed a method of replying to people on an application called Twitterfall which takes random tweets from the world of Twitter. My follower numbers started to climb more rapidly and I was able to reach more charities that way.

    My followers from across the Atlantic in America became a particular problem to communicate with because of living in different time zones but I began to use Direct Messages to good effect and progress continued with a conversation sometimes taking days instead of minutes but they were very useful contacts to have.

    I am pondering over whether to change my name to @tweeetcharity to make sure people know what I am about but they are getting my messages gradually and I am grateful for that.

    You have to continually rethink the ways that you use Social Media and adapt to new applications that come onto the market. It is possible to have more than one account / profile so it is likely that I will separate my two identities and use @TweeetStreet as a personal profile only.

    My next project is to master the use of spreadsheets and anything else that will keep all my information organised into easily accessed data. Currently I have over 1,000 charities and help sites listed alphabetical on paper. This is very time-consuming and not easy to access quickly!

    If you know of any online videos that explain Excel easily then please let me know @TweeetStreet , I will be very grateful.

    You can support my Awareness campaign of #tweeetcharity which is all about letting people know which charities, help sites and twitter users need our help by following me on twitter.com at @TweeetStreet

    Iain

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    Category Social Media, Social Networking | Tags: ,, | 19 Comments

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