One of the key realizations I’ve had about marketing is that it’s very important to track what works and doesn’t work with your marketing. I track which marketing activities help me get business and which ones don’t do anything and on the basis of that tracking I determine what I should continue doing and what I should let go.

For example, some time back I gave up using lead referral networking groups because I wasn’t getting much business from them…certainly not enough to justify the amount of money I spent on those groups. Since then I’ve joined three chambers of commerce and I was quickly able to determine that being involved in the chamber was much better for my business, because of what I tracked. What was very interesting to realize is that by not only changing the type of networking group, but also the activity associated with such a group I was able to figure out what worked best for me when it came to getting business.

The importance of that last statement is that its also important to track the specific activities that work or don’t work. By learning which activities work you can continue to focus on those activities, while also testing other activities to see if they also fit or don’t fit.

What I’ve also realized is that just because some activity works for one business doesn’t mean it will work for every business. Additionally each person has their strengths and weaknesses and so its important to learn what your strengths are and how you can use them to help market your business and put you in touch with your clientele.

Book Review: How to be a Fierce Competitor by Jeffrey Fox

This is a very relevant book to read in a time of economic recession, but its also a book I would recommend reading even during a time of economic boom. The author spells out in clear cut terms what activities and behaviors work to make a business a fierce competitor and more importantly a successful business. I like the use of stories, but I also like the author’s bluntness. The book is easy to read and to the point, but you will learn a lot in each chapter you read.

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I think one of the challenges with social media is learning how to turn your online network into an actual network. While it’s true that many of the people you’ll connect to online are people you might also see offline, not everyone you connect to is someone you see regularly. So the challenge that arises is how to become more than just an internet connection to someone.

Recently I’ve begun paring down my Linkedin connections. While I appreciate that a lot of people have chosen to connect with me, beyond being a number in my connections list, I don’t know most of them or how they will actually be meaningful to my life. So to determine if there is a possibility of a real relationship, I’m writing to my connections and asking them to tell me about themselves and what their needs are.

I’m not writing to them to solicit them, but I do want to know who they are, what’s important to them, and if I can help them in any way, shape, or form. Maybe I can connect them to someone I know or maybe I can answer a question, but I want to be more than a number and I also want them to be more than a number.

I also figure that if someone doesn’t write back, they probably aren’t interested in actually connecting with me in a meaningful way, so I’m willing to let them go as a connection, because I know nothing will come of a connection where I am just a number to someone else.

The challenge of turning an online network into an actual network is that the people you connect with have to be people with real needs so that you can really network with them. By writing a message to a person I’m connected to on Linkedin, my hope is that I’ll actually discover their needs and also become a person to them. My hope is that we’ll actually start networking for real instead of just accumulating numbers.

What about you? What makes a connection on any online site into a person who you are learning more and networking with?

Something I’ve noticed is that many people tend to post the same status update across all of their social networks. And what I’ve also noticed is that it seems like there’s less responses to such postings, because people can probably tell if you’re just blasting a post to all of your networks at the same time. To test this observation, I thought I would run a little experiment.

For one week I posted the same message to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. While I got some responses on Twitter, I got almost no responses on Facebook. There was not Twitter icon to indicate that I’d copied and pasted the same message, but the length of the message would give it away.

The next week I posted longer messages on my Facebook page and I ended up getting a lot more activity. By choosing not to limit myself to 140 characters, I could show my fans that I wasn’t just copying and pasting a message. People interacted more because they knew the message was different than what they would find on Twitter or another social media site with a 140 character limit.

The value of an experiment like this is that it teaches you how important it is to recognize that no two social media sites are really alike and also that people will probably be able to tell if you’ve cross-posted the same message across each social media platform. By varying my message for my Facebook page I was able to get more discussion and interaction than I had before. Treating each site like it has the same limits ultimately limits the interaction, because not each has site has the same limits when it comes to amount of text or other forms of interaction.

Have any of you tried to experiment with status updates, and if so what have your results been?

One of the interesting realities of social media is that in some ways its easier to lose credibility on a site than it is to lose it in person. I personally think the reason for that is simple. It all boils down to the fact that you have a semi-permanent medium of text, which people can look at and reference. If you make a mistake via text it can stay with you a lot longer, if people know where to look. Regardless, losing credibility isn’t something anybody wants to experience, so if you know how you can lose credibility, it can be worth looking over your posts to help you avoid losing credibility.

Reason 1: Typos

You’d think a pesky little issue such as spelling would be forgiven in the age of texting, but its not, especially if its clear that you are trying to use an actual word and you spell it wrong. In an age of spell check, people are much less forgiving if they notice typos in your writing, whether in your social media or on your website. Make the effort to scan what you’ve written for misspelled words, and also for missing words. Don’t rely on spellcheck alone, which will miss some words.

Reason 2: It’s all about you

Nobody likes to be around a person who just talks about him/herself. Narcissism isn’t that attractive accept to the person listening to him/herself. It’s okay to post about what you are doing, but mix it up with some responses, retweets, and show interest in other people. You’d be surprise what’ll happen when people realize you actually want know about them as opposed to just pushing your own agenda.

Reason 3: Hard selling

Social media is about soft touch, not hard selling. Use social media to do research and make initial contact. Learn about the person and at some point, try to set up an appointment via phone or in person and then make your pitch. But use social media to create the social context that allows you to make that pitch, instead of trying to pitch people on social media.

Reason 4: No engagement

If you never respond to someone else, it makes a person wonder if you are really involved or if you just have everything set up on auto-pilot. Engagement is a sign that you are actually involved and interested in what people have to say and offer.

These are just a few reasons people lose credibility on social media sites. What are some reasons you would ad? What do you look for to tell you if someone is a spammer?

Typically, what I read and see in regards to social media is how it can be used for marketing, how it can be used to get in the door and catch the eyes of people. But I think social media is a lot more than just marketing or even networking. Social media needs to be examined in terms of how it can or can’t be applied to all areas of a person’s business.

Christopher Koch brought up a point recently about lessons companies can learn from people such as Steven Slater and Mark Hurd. That point is that people are making it easier and easier to find out what they have to say and what they are doing all the time. And the question for business is simple: Are you listening and responding to what people have to say?

When you don’t listen to what’s being said it creates problems that could’ve been contained if people had just made the effort to find out what the problems actually are. But businesses tend to react to situations, instead of putting some thought into how they can actually get on top of a situation meaningfully. In many ways businesses don’t even care what people are saying or make a lame effort to show they care, when they don’t. While that may sound harsh, it’s worth saying especially when businesses don’t seem to make an effort to address problems conclusively or with respect to the employees or customers that have problems.

A business is only as good as the level of service it provides customers and employees. Businesses that make efforts to listen to employees and to customers will definitely benefit in the long run, especially if we consider that a happy person is much more productive than an unhappy person. Monitoring what people say and making the effort to respond can pay off in the long run, especially if the business makes inroads with the community overall in their communication.

Recently I attended a biznik event where MJ Cherkauer and Teresa Rodden presented an interesting approach to networking. Instead of just offering the usual elevator speech they asked participants to ask questions such as: “If your business was a color, what color would it be?” or “What street in your city most resembles your business?” Now these questions are admittedly a littler colorful, but they are also useful questions because they get you to consider your business from a new light.

For example, I was asked the second question I mentioned above. I decided to describe my business in terms of how it could help someone navigate busiest traffic on on a very busy street. When people heard that, they got a lot out of it, and they felt like they had a better understanding of how my business could help them or someone they knew.

The benefit of getting creative in telling people what it is we do is that we can tell people in terms they can understand. One of the biggest challenges businesses face is the ability to tell people what it is they do in a manner that makes sense to those people. Using some creativity and getting a bit descriptive can tell people about your business from an angle they haven’t considered before.

You can also ask other people creative questions to help them describe their business in a different way than they usually would. Not only will it help you learn more about them, but it’ll challenge them to think differently about how they describe their business.

Networking is an activity all businesses and many professionals need to do, but we should take it upon ourselves to get creative about it. And we should also take it on ourselves to learn more about the person beyond what s/he does, because in doing so we get a better feel for his/her personality and can then think of people who fit him/her well.

Networking doesn’t have to be boring. It can be an exciting activity, if we are willing to spice it up. I knowing spicing it up the way MJ and Teresa recommended has been useful for me to do.

One of the prevailing attitudes about customer service is that its just about damage control: Dealing with customer complaints. But customer service shouldn’t just be about damage control, and while social media is a wonderful medium for tracking what customers are saying or aren’t saying about your business, it also offers the opportunity to simply get into conversations with clients.

It seems to me that one part of customer service that’s ignored is customer retention. So while customer service will handle customer complaints, they won’t necessarily be proactive and actually talk with customers to establish a relationship with them based on trust as opposed to distrust. With social media, it’s easy to actually get involved in the conversation with a customer.

Here’s a tactic I use with my clients, that could also be used by other businesses, (even large ones) provided they are willing to assign customer service reps to specific clients. In Twitter create a specific list called clients and put all of your clients on there. On Facebook become a fan of their fan pages (if they are a business) and make it a point to visit those pages once a day. For each social media site there is a way to check up on clients, and engage them in conversation, provided you are willing to invest the time in doing so. Start conversations with your clients, or make a response to something they say that has nothing to do with your business. In short, show support for what matters to them, instead of waiting for them to contact you when they have a problem. By doing this you’ll be showing them that your interested in having a relationship with them, regardless of whether or not you’re doing business with them at the time.

Customer service should be about relationships first and damage control second. No business has an excuse for not investing in customer relationships, because each business is ultimately successful because of the customers. The product or service offered is only useful if someone wants to buy it, use it, and tell people about it. So ask yourself this: Is your customer service about damage control or actually getting to know your clients?

The other day Chris Brogan posted about the possibility of a social crash. He argues that with social media there is a lot of hyper-connectivity, which leads to ambient relationships, where we touch people via social media, but don’t necessarily have any further contact. Chris rightly wonders what will happen to all of our relationships with so much hyper connection.

I think while Chris is correct to note the ambient relationships that can be formed via social media, that it is possible to also form meaningful relationships with people on social media sites. Also social media is used to make people aware of situations in other people’s lives and in some cases those connections have pulled together to help someone out, even if they didn’t know the person well.

It’s true that social media makes it possible for even casual connections to stay more connected than they would have before, but I don’t think this will necessarily lead to a social crash. It may actually lead to people being more aware of the people they want to spend quality time with and using social media to stay up on those people’s lives and coordinating getting together with them.

At the same time, being connected to so many more people can be daunting because with many of those people we won’t really get to know them. They will provide us status updates, brief snippets of their lives, and then be gone. It is only with some effort on our part that we’ll be able to significantly make a relationship with them and usually both people will need to see a clear need for that relationship to occur.

Even with said I don’t think a social collapse will occur. Instead what I hope will occur is that people will become more thoughtful and aware of the relationships they chose to cultivate and make more effort to get to know the people who they feel are important to them, using both social media and other forms of communication. That, at least for me, is how I’ve used social media.

Return on Relationship is more than just a buzz phrase. It’s a philosophy about Relationships and how important they are for business.