One of the great opportunities that social media allows us is to find and connect with people and companies with similar interests and reach out to them with an efficiency we’ve never seen before.  While many join social networks with the thought of “I’m here new customers. Come to me!” we’ve found that one of the best uses of social media has been in connecting with companies or people that we would have struggled to meet with otherwise. We then take those online introductions to build solid offline relationships.

Social media trumps the Contact Us form

How much luck have you had trying to connect with a company via their Contact Us form?  Same here.  However, we’ve had a great experience connecting by genuinely commenting on a person or company’s blog post when we could add value or share an experience.  We’ve also had a lot of luck Direct Messaging someone via Twitter.  The main reason for both is that with social media, the person you’re trying to reach can look at your profile, blog, and social media comments to see what you’re really about. It’s easy to filter out the legitimate connections. One mistake people make is to blindly comment on a blog post without adding any helpful input and making a blatant plug for their company.  This is the fastest way to get ignored by the blogger as well as everyone following that post.

It’s much easier to meet someone in person that you’ve already met online

For those attending conferences and networking events, sometimes it’s hard to make that initial introduction and connection to someone you’ve never met before.  However, when you’ve been following a person’s blog or their Tweets for the last few months(and hopefully, they’re doing the same), you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to walk up the person, introduce yourself, and immediately start talking about your topic of mutual interest. The additional bonus is that you will both tend to help each other out more in the future and show some social media love after you’ve met each other in person.  It’s human nature to help those you know and like.

To date, we’ve used social media to introduce ourselves and build relationships with; multiple startups, other companies in our industry, industry bloggers, venture capital firms and investors that focus in our area, industry trendsetters, and our company advisor.  It’s all been genuine and hasn’t happened over night but it’s been powerful and gotten us farther then any Contact Us form ever did.

If you have any examples of how you or your company have used social media to start and build relationships, please let us know.

 

(Photo “to put the rest aside” by crysb)

Tags: Networking, relationships, Social Media, social networking

Posted by Scotton Oct.20, 2009@ 9:48 am

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.