Posts by verdox
4 posts • joined Wednesday 18th April 2012 16:03 GMT
Re: most people have better things to do
Most people making something (for business) need to sell the something they make. If you need to sell something then how do you go about selling it? You can use traditional channels but an alternative approach might be to monitor Twitter for your brand name, product or service and find people with a real need for your product rather than cold calling or door knocking - if your product is a mass consumer product then you can find people who have a direct genuine interest in your product on Facebook and create a very cost effective targeted advertising campaign. Is your business local only? Then geo-target the campaign, is it niche? then drill down and find people who care about your niche.
It is great that you make something, but you also need to sell that something or it is just a hobby not a business. You can ignore social networking, but then I guess when print was in it's infancy there were many people talking about these new printed advertisements, ink! pah! It will never catch on.
Re: short sighted
That is an excellent idea, being able to set your desired salary (privately) and enabling that to be applied to filters when HR and recruitment staff are using the platform would make an excellent addition to their service, however you are still thinking about LinkedIn as a recruitment platform, LinkedIn is a business platform.
If you step outside of the recruitment vertical that you have focused on then you will be surprised to find a wealth of information that business has deemed essential for decades prior to the concept of social networking being dreamt up. If you wear the hat of someone working in marketing or business development you will be able to dream up many ways of working with the data available to you on social networks that when used alongside existing business systems can provide a lot of value. LinkedIn has a very robust policy on its data usage, the spamming techniques you mention break their TOS, the fact is people using networks in the manner you describe are wasting their time, I think companies should be working with not against the platforms and in doing so you can achieve some excellent results.
Your article also points at the entire social networking genre, not just LinkedIn, Twitter for example is an excellent platform to provide proactive customer service on and Facebook is a fantastic B2C advertising platform. The adoption of social networking has been unprecedented, and it is providing forward thinking smart companies with a lot more value than posting cat pictures as your article suggests. Of course you might be right and the millions using it wrong, but I suspect not!
short sighted
I am not going to debate if social networking works or if it is crap but I am going to say that you have been very short sighted about how useful it is to a modern business. Historically companies have retained databases of their customers and the relationships those customers have with companies, customer relationship management is nothing new to business and I am sure not many people would question the value of correctly recording the details about how you engage with your clients and measure the impact that your marketing activity has. Social networking is an often overlooked component that you are selling short if you feel the only benefit is to human resources and head-hunters. There is not enough space here for me to explain the full value but let me give you an example…
A business receives a referral from a customer (a common scenario) so adds that prospect customer into their CRM database and assigns it to someone to follow-up, at this stage if you scan LinkedIn you can find information about that company including its turnover, number of employees, company type, how long it has been trading – more importantly you can establish who in your network you can speak to connected to that company. This information is not used for the purposes of spamming (of course it can be!) but it can demonstrate how you are connected to your prospect customer and who can genuinely introduce you to someone there that might be interested in what you have to say.
By using LinkedIn in the way it was intended and working with the degrees of separation concept you can establish ways of connecting with prospect customers your traditional CRM system could never have revealed. This provides value to everyone using the network. These concepts are not limited to LinkedIn, with some creative thinking social media can enhance relationship management and customer service providing real demonstrable value to users of those networks.
Not one of you have understood why he did this, for 1bn he has got direct access into an application that integrates fully into his competitors social networks, duh??? it was worth every penny.
