Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I think that one common thread of Web 2.0 and its elements is that it takes some time for online communities and tools to show their value. I think we sometimes expect instant or extreme results through using blogs, online comunities, etc., but it's my experience that Web 2.0 works best as a complement that you use over time, observe over time, and gain insight from over time.

There could be a contact, topic, or avenue where your expertise is needed, and you may not see it until a month from now or further down the road. That's where the importance/role you assign to Web 2.0 is key, if you view it as something that yields a return in days or weeks, I think you are setting yourself up for disappointment because those are exceptions rather than norms. On the flip side, if you view Web 2.0 as one element in a mix of others, then you will be able to shape your approach and your metrics to account for how gradual Web 2.0's effect is.

There is no Web 2.0 rulebook, but best practices suggest that the most successful Web 2.0 tools/campaigns are those that are scalable based on the particular industry, the target audience, and the realities of the market. If a group/individual is devoting the majority of their time to Web 2.0 when their audience/market isn't really in tune with those tools, then their ROI may never be worth it because they are putting in way too much time and effort based on what will be a small return given their scenario. Meanwhile, the best users of Web 2.0 know how to use their specific situation to tailor the resources they devote to it.

So, LinkedIn can offer value, but it takes some time - just like alot of other online communities and web tools. The key is devoting just enough time to it to put yourself in a position to yield results in the future. If you're visible and positioned around communities such as LinkedIn and KHE, there will be opportunities for discussion & sharing of expertise - those two elements don't always guarantee business opportunities, but they certainly make them more likely.

Let me share my story...
I had 28 years of industry experience when I formed River Heights Consulting. During those 28 years I have worked with litterally hundreds of others. Some were very close friends, others were friends and some were aquaintences. I did my best to keep in touch with most of them, but you know how life goes. We exchanged Christmas Cards for a few years then something happened. They moved, I moved or we just lost touch.

When I founded River Heights Consulting, I decided I would not try to sell to my friends, instead I would ask my friends to help me spot opportunities. Obviously the more friends I could keep in touch with the better. I went through my archives and started rebuilding my friends list.

Linked-in has helped me find friends from years ago, reconnect with friends from college and helped people find me.

I rarely need to make a completely cold call. I can nearly always find somebody who knows the person I want to speak with.

But it isnt a one way street. I have assisted others in finding jobs, new employees and long lost friends.

Can I put a dollar value on this? Not really but I can asure you it is part of my ongoing plan.

Put some effort into building your contacts and so on but look at it as an event you attend where you exchange business cards. Business people do that all the time but they do not expect instant results.

You join it to network. If you get business, great. If you are in it for quick sales then it is going to turn people off just like if you went to a networking event of some sort and were all about self promotion and promotion of your product.

In this respect, it is very similar to real world networking. Networking does not yield instant results and results should not be your only goal. But sometimes the seeds you have planted yield fruit. If you do not have the patience for that, you probably would hate real world networking.

If you DO have the patience for real world networking, then LinkIn can work for your, too. I know plenty of people who have benefited from both Web 2.0 networking and real world networking but rarely instantly in either case.

Wow, This post really sparked a tremendous amount of interest and varied top class replies. I think that alone will start to show to you the power of social networking :)

Here is my humble opinion for what it is worth.

marketing in the online space (web 2.0 3.0 or whatever you want to call it) is exactly the same as marketing in the offline space.

It has always been the case that if you could find a group of like minded individuals who share a common purpose (like a club for instance). Then you could sell something to them. Not just anything of course but something relevant to their particular line of interest.

What was difficult previously was that you needed to join all these clubs and pretend to actually be interested in golf or star trek or whatever :)

Now with web 2.0 you can join a social networking site and within the millions of users there, gain access to 'clubs' (groups of like minded individuals who share a common interest) in fashion, or music or marketing (such as marketing profs). So now you can offer relevant products and or services to these communities just like before.

many companies (like ours) are hiring swathes of college kids just to spend al day chatting inside 'face book' 'my space' 'aujourdhui.com' etc etc.

Their job is to post interesting blogs and great videos and make sure plenty of users are getting to see them. From within there, we redirect some of those users to our paying services. It works.

In our case, we are using interns to do it but many companies are hiring people in India and Philippines who work for $5.00 per day just to do these activities. (we are hiring 5 more interns this week just to get into it).

Currently, I am having difficulty to hire journalists and writers form the Philippines because they are all already snapped up by marketing companies from the US. They are spending 8 hours per day working from home with their lap tops, just blogging :) There are litteraly thousands of them doing it daily and after a while they get good at it.

Hope that these insights are useful.

I like LinkedIn but like many people commenting here haven't invested enough time in it yet to make it work for me. (As an old Asia hand I appreciate the elegant Chinese quotes posted above, but also like Lenny Bruce's much earthier one-liner: "Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you've put into it.")

It's not too early to begin looking beyond Web 2.0. In a year or so there will be so much self-serving pap on Facebook etc that the content will be about as easily verifiable as a politician's campaign assurances. Even today we see weekly reminders that people aren't what they seem (fictional "memoirs" etc), and Wikipedia warns us to take their "expert" articles with significant grains of salt.

I think the insights offered by various "Everything Is Miscellaneous" materials are good signposts toward Web 2.0's systemic weaknesses, which can only become more problematic until one of us notices that Emperor 2.0 has no clothes on, and figures out how to do something productive about it.

At Least LinkedIn takes its members seriously enough to deny certain privileges to people who misrepresent themselves, or try to inflate their networks with people who don't know them. That's why so many executives are listed in LinkedIn--and is something you can't get with Facebook etc, as far as I know. The promise of getting more reliable as well as relevant information is a good reason to invest the time it takes to make LinkedIn work for you.

I look forward to the MarketingProfs webinar in May