Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Every Saturday morning I take my son to his swimming lessons, which is truly one of the highlights of my week. My wife has deemed these weekend classes “dad soup”, because it seems this is the day when all the fathers are around to jump in the pool. Last weekend, I bumped into an old colleague who I had not seen in several years. We were Facebook “friends”, but in typical fashion, never really interacted much aside from the casual status “thumbs up”.

It was clear from the way the conversation went that he had been following what I was doing through my activity on Facebook. This gave us new things to talk about, particularly given I had done some work in his area of speciality, and it also led to the discussion of some potential contract work.

This is a great example of the intersection of social and real world networking, and the tremendous value of the latter.

As a more connected business generation, we have the tendency to spend far too much time in front of the computer working on our digital relationships with people we’ve never met. Virtual relationships can tend to be passive, and the opportunity to truly engage with someone can be lost in the barrage of messages.

Sometimes, it pays to swtich off and actually have a conversation with someone in person.  As an online business owner in particular, there is tremendous merit in this. If you had a physical high street presence, you would have regular customers who come by and purchase, because you are taking the time to understand their needs and have developed a relationship with them.  They know you, they feel comfortable with you, and most importantly they trust you. Even with casual browsers, the opportunity to engage and convert them is higher.

The great faceless divide of the web can make it difficult to cultivate a similar relationship, so why not flip that on its head? Depending on exactly which industry you are in, engaging you customers in a physical social situation can prove invaluable. I’m not suggesting all customers, but certainly high value customers are worth spending time on. Organise some social drinks, some tickets to a sports event with you - some activity that allows not only you to interact with them in the real world, but other customers. Be sure however, to stick by the rules of online social networking – that is, it’s not about selling to them, but saying thanks and getting to know them.

There is room for both types of networking in business, and I believe physical networking should underpin relationships with your customers (particularly the high value ones), and be augmented by social web tools.  By taking the opportunity to bring together like minded individuals, you become the social platform that creates a network – without a computer in sight.

Related posts:

1. Twitter as a Customer Service Tool
2. How Social Media Can Help (and Hinder) Your Business
3. Highlights from the Social Media Strategies Lunch
4. Is Social Media Just Marketing to Your Competitors?
5. Who Are You On Twitter?

Tags: customer engagement, Customer Service, relationships, Social Networking

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Best Practice, Customer Service, Online Reputation, Social Networking. 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.