Social skills
It seems like a new gadget comes up on the web every five minutes. The latest must-do thing to join up to. And as a complete gadgetphobe I initially sneer at them all. That, combined with the fact that I hate the phrase ‘web 2.0′ even more than ‘brand building’ or ‘multi-media’ or even the use of ‘old school’ to describe any hip hop more recent than 1990 and you can see I don’t make a natural Social Networker. However, this post is all about what can be done when you make use of the right tools at the right time to plug your business.
I spoke to two guys who have built a business out of marketing using the social web. They learning how to gather contacts and use them to get funnel traffic through to the clients they work for. Us at UpsideDownturn have put our hands to this newfangled stuff and you can find a page about us on Facebook, our articles appearing on Digg, Reddit and Propeller and we use our respective Twitter accounts to announce new postings.
We’ve also spent a while dipping into bookmarking services, forums and networking tools that don’t work. You need to know what things are worth spending time on and which aren’t. The thing is that what doesn’t work might be different for different people. We find that Digg is cliquey and difficult to get any play on, but some of the smaller social bookmarkers more receptive to people who aren’t neccessarily ‘in the circle’.
The point, in terms of work, is the idea of community and how you nurture that sector that is serviced by your business. If you can tap into those communities, or even create one from scratch, you are helping yourself more easily than trying to artificially build your brand or struggling to make yourself a household name. The right tools are out there to look after these communities and waiting for you to use them. Let me know what you discover.
