Which professional networks?

As you well know (and as previously discussed), there is a fine line between making effective use of online professional networks, and spending all day connecting, tweeting, commenting and blogging.

Who has all day to do this? Unless your job title is 'Online Marketing Specialist', then you'll need to consider a new network carefully.

Is it a useful marketing tool that will help win business? Or is it a time-wasting drag, devised by a clever techie start-up obsessed with bumping up their member numbers so they can make a quick buck with advertisers while dreaming of being the next Facebook?

Here's a high level review of some of the main networks. For more in-depth detail, or for some help on which are most suitable for your industry, contact KnowledgeWorks. More to follow in a few days.


Spoke

Spoke says it has 60 million users, mainly in the US. Basic membership is free but premium is costly (from $25 to $99 monthly). Most comments posted by members are dated from 2007 or earlier, so our guess is they’re not getting very many new users, or any up to date discussions. In any case, this is more of a 'people finder' than a professional networking site.


Xing

Xing is probably the most successful online professional network in Europe, after LinkedIn. It has 8 million members worldwide, with most of these European. Xing has strong corporate backing and this, along with with reasonable membership fees, is a good first step to a solid business model. Xing's functionality is very similar to LinkedIn – a blend of networking, discussions, and also job searches. It has yet to make a big impact in Ireland and the UK, but watch this space.


Zoominfo

This is essentially a US-based list broker. It claims functionality as an online networking site, but in fact it’s about accessing lists and contact details for people and companies. Zoominfo gathers data abut people and invites users to register in order to ‘reclaim’ your data and fine tune the profile that already exists for you. Even the free trial to premium level at Zoominfo requires that users share their entire address book (from Gmail or Outlook etc). Usually these sites allow you to pick and choose which of your contacts you’d like to search for, but Zoominfo takes it all. This site might be useful if you need lists from the US, but not for professional networking.


Jigsaw

This is a good US based B2B directory with contact details only. It has powerful search functionality, with a very detailed search engine, although data is likely to be scraped from other sources rather than contributed by the individuals themselves. Jigsaw charges for obtaining contact information. Again, Jigsaw could be useful for finding people and their contact information, but it's not useful for networking. Jigsaw has recently been acquired by Salesforce.com, the contact management business, and this could raise issues about ownership of data.

SME: Are you budgeting for market research?

A colleague commented recently that many SMEs don't budget at the start of the year for market research.

I've worked with a lot of SMEs, and I know these things about SME owner managers:

• you are dedicated to growing your business


• you expend every ounce of your knowledge and experience in bringing about this growth


• you constantly seek to expand your own skills by networking with others to learn more - in order to grow your business.

I also know that:

• in a small small team you must outsource: your pool of knowledge is by nature limited


• there are areas which can help to grow your business, which you may not until now have utilised - these can be a number of things: technological, operational, or market based research


• market research will always help you to stay ahead of the competition


• research is a pre-requisite to succesful expansion or business development

I've seen it time and time again. Companies operate within their comfort zone: they anlayse the hell out of the factors they're familiar with, such as the supply chain, manufacturing, quality control and so on. But with the best will in the world, ad-hoc necessities like research tend to fall much lower on the prioirty list - largely because they're outside an SME owner's area of expertise and experience, and because they're ad-hoc.

Allocate a small amount this year, and use it when you're tearing your hair out saying:

• Why am I losing sales to this new competitor? What are they doing that's new?
• I don't understand enough about this market to take this risk! Am I making a mistake?
• How can I estimate for stock levels when I don't know the size of this new segment?

It's a fact that regular research will help a business to step outside the box a little, shift direction, identify an opportunity and perhaps avoid a pothole or two along the way.

So the message is, allocate a piece of your budget for research - it'll pay off next year, wait and see.

Our personal lives revealed

The US has seen some growth in people search engines recently. Enter a person’s name and results show any personal information about them, including their Facebook pages, linked in page, website, etc. Some examples are Wink , PeekYou, and Zoominfo for business people.

Ok, it might seem like a ‘nice-to-have’, a bit like the google images search which restrict searches to results with pictures. Or an easy way to find a person’s LinkedIn page. Or an easier way to find a long lost friend or classmate (without all the Google Search results clutter).

However, there are more ominous uses! Most notable is the trend of employers using these search engines to trawl social networking sites to find out more about potential new employees (or partners, or suppliers, or contractors or consultants…).

Suddenly, that photo of you on your friend’s Facebook page where you’re dancing on a bar table with your trousers on your head might not seem quite so funny...

Until recently, it’s been fairly easy to keep personal information personal. Watch what you say, stay circumspect about life outside the office and no-one will find out about your personal peccadillos.

However, sites like these (as well as a regular Google search) mean that your personal life is increasingly on show. Now your professional connections can search and view and wonder, and maybe even think twice about that job offer based on what they see you doing in your spare time.

Like a lot of trends, 'people-check' is slowly making its way to our shores. Krishna De reported in her blog this week that 40% of European tech firms check social media profiles of potential employees. Krishna also reports that Irish SMEs are embracing social media marketing - and this means they’re likely to use it for people-check too.

Unsurprisingly, the US market has come up with a partial solution. Naymz is an online professional network which offers members the option of a Google ad which appears when their name is searched, pointing to their profile on Naymz. It's designed to encourage people to just look at the ad, get the information they need there, and ignore other Google search results.

Naymz used to also offer 'search engine flooding': camouflaging a web page that you don't want people to see. They create lots of related but postitive comment about you, and work to get that placed higher in the search engines. This 'search engine flooding' technique might eventually push the offending page to Page 2 of more of Google results, making it unlikely to be spotted. However, Naymz haven't been giving this the big sell recently, meaning it's probably not effective enough.

So, reader, the moral of the story is: be good, and if you can't be good - BE CAREFUL!

Running on empty

Damien Mulley talked in his blog last week about what a desperate state Ireland is in and how things look so bleak and unpromising. However, he then went on to list some of the advantages of doing business in this environment.

It’s true: though the outlook does look very bleak there are things we can be doing to win sales, develop our business and stay ahead of the competition. And the most obvious of them is... online networking of course.

It's running, because despite what you might think it will work for you. And you're doing it on empty, because it's free. If business is slower than usual and you have some down time, then use this time to get up and running online, and here are three good reasons why:

Your customers expect you to be expert, in all things!
First off, everyone is thinking about it, so if you’re a service provider and you DON’T have an online presence then you’re looking outdated and out of touch. Customers want to know that you’re ahead of the game in all things service-oriented and digital (whether this has anything to do with your business or not). So developing and maintaining an online presence is a must.

(NOTE when I say online presence I mean on professional networks, on twitter, blogging, etc. Of course you have a decent website, that goes without saying)

It's marketing, at no cost
Secondly, it’s an inexpensive way to network and win sales, particularly if you’re cash strapped. There are no associated costs, except for your time. That beats shelling out for advertising, brochures or DM mailings for sure.

It's a great way to build your expertise
Finally, it’s a great way to easily develop your expertise. You can connect with like minded people and learn from them, all from the comfort of your own desk (or PC or mobile device). Free webinars, excellent expert blogs, tweetmeets, LinkedIn group discussions – these are all available and cover your sector or industry for sure. And if they don’t then set up a group and get people talking. Once you sort out the wheat from the chaff, and figure out which ones are bringing you real knowledge (and which are wasting your time) then you can’t help but learn. and once you start to communicate this learning with your prospects and customers, then you’re actively keeping one step ahead of the competition.

So, in a nutshell, use the downtime to get online, get your presence felt there, and use it as a long term strategy to build revenue and grow your business.

Advertising – not the be-all and end-all

I read a blog post recently about a consultant who was trying to develop his business and wanted to advertise. This person immediately began an analysis of potential costs and returns for each advertising medium, as well as some brief analysis of who their customer might be and how best to reach them.

What he hadn’t considered at all was that advertising might not be the best way for him to grow revenue.

Businesses sometimes see advertising (often mass market advertising) as being the goal of a cash rich business – have the cash, spend it on advertising and watch the business roll in. Instead it can prove a costly mistake, either as an overall strategy or in implementation.

I worked with a client who was thinking along the same lines – this business needed to grow revenue and wanted me to advise them on how best to advertise.

First a little on the company background: the business owner/managers were two ‘techies’ who had set up an online retail business. Their expertise was technical, and certainly not consumer or retail.

I immediately called ‘Whoa there’. Mass market advertising is not always the right way to go – in fact it could bring huge problems like an inability to meet demand due to stock or resource issues, leading to poor customer service and brand damage, to name but a few.

My client was in a similar boat: our research showed that mass marketing just wouldn’t work for their business: instead they needed to build their brand and market to their specific segments, thereby growing the business organically.

A key option which I explored with them was to diversify a little: we recommended that they use their technical expertise to ‘white label’ their offering to other players in the market. Our research showed that other players were struggling to move to online retailing. These companies had the retail experience but not the technical expertise (which my client had in spades).

This strategy proved a successful one: now the client is working on technical projects they are good at, enjoy, and are growing their expertise. A little targeted advertising and brand development kept their core business in growth mode too, albeit slower than they had originally envisaged.

Acceptable frequency of blog posts?

It's interesting that as soon as my day job gets busy the first thing to suffer is this blog.

There's a lesson there for all of you potential bloggers out there, and one I've evidently yet to learn myself.

Blogging must be regular - even if it's short - otherwise readers will look elsewhere, as I've done myself many times. It's the regularity of the posting that makes it up to date, relevant and interesting. A post that's more than a few weeks old smacks of half heartedness. It says to the reader: "Don't bother checking this blog again as this could have been my last post". We've enough to do every day without clicking through to an empty blog to check for a post. And those 10 seconds wasted out of anyone's day is an insult, if you ask me.

So, please accept my apologies for having having been such a lame poster in the last few weeks.

What do you all think - what's the minimum acceptable frquency of blog posts?

• Hourly
• Daily
• Twice a week
• Weekly
• Twice monthly
• Monthly

I know there are ways to get alerted for a new blog post but not everyone uses these, so let me have your thoughts.

Personally, I think two weeks is about the longest I'd be happy to leave a blog empty for. Ideally I'd like to post twice a week.So, I'm not happy with my recent lack of posts. In future, I'm going to try to stick with this limit, and if I can't do that, I'll stop blogging.

How's that for a promise!

Twitter: beyond the basics (in plain english)

There's a lot being written about twitter these days, but I still think that the language used can be complex and potentially off-putting to new users. Writers also dwell a lot on the advanatages of using twitter, but not enough on HOW to use it.

In my last twitter post I described how to get started on twitter. For those of you who've now dabbled a little, here are a few pointers on how to use it more effectively, and efficiently.



Direct Messaging (DM)

This allows you to send a private message to one of your connections. It's similar to an email except it's done through twitter by typing D before their username (e.g. D kwroisin How are you today?). If the recipient is using one of the packages below, they'll see the DM on their screen. Otherwise they'll get an email telling them to log into twitter to view their new DM.

NB: Don't confuse this with putting an '@' before their username: this addresses your tweet directly to that person (e.g. @kwroisin how are you today?) but everyone else can see this message. Unlike this, DMs are private.


Using Hootsuite (or similar) for twitter

The http://www.twitter.com/ website is not the easiest way to use Twitter. It shows the last tweets by your followees in order of most recent first, and not a lot else.

What you might want to do is sign up to one of the twitter 'clients' which allow you to view several information streams at once. Hootsuite is very popular, as is Tweetdeck. I chose Hootsuite because you just need to register an account: Tweetdeck requires a software download to your computer.

I now have three tabs open on Hootsuite. The first tab (or my home page) has three columns displaying: New Tweets, my Direct Messages, and Mentions (of me or of my tweets).

One thing that puzzled me before using Hootsutie is if someone addresses me directly (e.g. @kwroisin, see above), I won't see it if I'm not using twitter at the time. However, Hootsuite stores these messages in its Mentions column, so I can see them any time, whenever I log in.

If you use MS Outlook all the time for your email, then you can download this software which allows you to use and manage twitter in a similar way to how you use and manage your Outlook emails. If you use gmail then you can use Twitter Gadget to interface with twitter. And of course you can use your phone and your iphone and more...


Using Hootsuite (or similar) to view all your social networks

The second tab open in Hootsuite shows my Facebook page, with all my Friend's updates. The third tab shows my LinkedIn page, and all the activity there.

This means that (1) I'm more up to date with what's going on in my networks and (2) I spend a lot less time logging in to various networks, entering my username and password forty times a day. What a relief.


Using Hootsuite (or similar) to schedule your tweets

If you're going to be out of the office or busy at work and you don't want to be very silent on twitter then there is a solution. Hootsuite (and other twitter clients) will allow you to schedule your pre-written tweets for whatever time you'd like to post them. So, for example, I'm at an all-day meeting on Thursday. On Wednesday, I compose four tweets and instruct Hootsuite to post them at two hourly intervals the next day. It now appears to others that I'm always at my desk and consistently coming up with interesting things to tweet about.


Finally...

There are even more tricks to using twitter efficiently but the ones above are more or less essential. For more on twitter ettiquette and how to benefit most from twitter, watch this space.