Leveraging Social Networks
Good news! The entrepreneurial qualities survey has reached one of my milestones. As of late Friday, I have ten responses from entrepreneurs. As you remember, I was going to leave the survey open until I had thirty total responses or ten responses from entrepreneurs. I’ve taken a quick peek at the responses and while I can’t say I saw any huge surprises, there were definitely some interesting trends that were different than I was expecting. I’ll also say that I got some great input and observations on the third question about qualities missed and miscellaneous comments.
It’s probably going to take me upwards of a week to process the responses and make sense of them in a post. This was a preliminary survey with minimal responses, so I’m not trying to make a science experiment out of it, but I also don’t want to just slop the results out without some organization. I’m also headed out of town a couple days this week for a mini-vacation, so that will eat into a couple nights I would otherwise be slaving over this blog to keep my readers informed!
In the meantime, I’m going to keep the survey open. As I’m going to talk about in this post, I used a couple social networks to drive traffic to the survey. There’s no sense closing down the survey while the network effects are still rippling out and keeping the survey open will probably catch a few more responses in the meantime. So I thought I’d talk just a bit about the approach I took to the survey, my immediate results and some conclusions/observations on leveraging social networks.
First of all, I don’t mean to come off as some sort of social network expert. There are many people out there with much more experience, expertise and insight than I will probably ever have. Throughout my career I have seldom become an expert in any one thing, preferring instead to be very good in many things.
This whole social network arena is a fascinating one to me, both technically and socially. Over the last six months or so I’ve started to get a bit more serious about it on a couple fronts, and the entrepreneurial survey was a great opportunity to try some different methods out.
What I tried
- Obviously, the first method I tried was posting the survey to this blog. I initially included the link to the survey a couple times in a post that described the survey and what I was going to do with it. I then also included it in the DCO Weekend Reader. a post I publish weekly with a variety of articles from around the web focused on leadership, personal excellence, entrepreneurship and other topics.
- While I had created a Facebook profile quite a while ago, I just recently got serious about playing around with apps and figuring out how to use it effectively. While I only have a small handful of “friends” on Facebook, I posted a comment on my “wall” saying I was looking for people to take my survey on entrepreneurial qualities.
- I entered a “discussion” in a LinkedIn group I am a member of, the “I love startups” group. A LinkedIn group discussion is not so much a discussion, as it is posting a thought, comment or question that everyone else in the group can comment on. So I posted with a link to the blog post talking about the survey and asking any entrepreneurs or leaders would take the survey. The group profile page indicates that this group has 14,715 members.
My Immediate Results
Blogging
As expected, I got minimal response from the initial blog post. Actually I guess, it depends on how you look at the results. I only collected about 3 responses in the couple days following the post. That sounds rather low. However, if you factor in that blog readers are notorious for extremely low reponse rates (comments, survey, etc.), and look at those 3 responses as a percentage of my total readership (which is currently running probably around 10-20 readers), then that wasn’t a bad response.
The Facebook response was interesting. I had been trying to reach out to a colleague earlier in the day and got a reject on his E-Mail address. This wasn’t unusual as this is a young entrepreneur and he has switched jobs a lot in the past couple years. So I logged into Facebook as he is one of my friends and I figured I’d track him down that way. Sure enough, not only was his new job there, but he was online. We exchanged a couple E-Mails within Facebook, I got his new contact information, and I ended by asking him if he’d be willing to take my survey. He said he would and just to post it.
So I posted the link to my survey post as a Wall note. Your “Wall” in Facebook is a place where you post comments, notes, links to pictures, whatever. You can also see everything that all your friends have posted to their Walls. And you can all comments on each other’s entries. It’s kind of like a big, interactive, well… Wall filled with electronic graffiti.
Anyway, for those people who know me, they know I can be a bit obsessive about details. (Really - I have it under control. REALLY!). So just for kicks, I waited about fifteen minutes and checked the survey and sure enough there was a new response. I sent a quick E-mail to the colleague I had just tracked down and he said he hadn’t taken it.
The LinkedIn group discussion was where most of the survey responses came from. Not surprising given that there are over 14K members I suppose. I know this from looking at web statistics for the blog. Since the link I gave was to the blog post instead of direct to the survey, then my web statistics for the blog showed incoming referrers. The same day I saw a big spike in inbound LinkedIn traffic, I also saw a big spike in clicks on the survey link. As some of you out there know, web statistics sometimes requires quite a bit of interpretation, and even then you’re never sure you can extract a lot of meaning out of them. However, since I don’t have that much traffic, this one was pretty easy to correlate.
Observations on my little experiment
I’ve made this post much longer than I probably should of to demonstrate a couple points:
- Social Networks aren’t just interesting playthings our sons and daughters use to stay in touch. They have huge potential for business and should be approached as a unique marketing channel with it’s own strategy and tactics.
- Like many business strategies, what you get out of social networking relies on what you put into it. One of the key differences with social networking, in my mind, is the potential for exponential payback to your investment as your campaign ripples out into the network.
I am not an expert in social networking. I only have about 10 or so people reading my blog. I have even fewer friends on Facebook. While I’m fairly proficient on LinkedIn, I certainly don’t have the time to be plugged into it daily. With all those as givens though, here’s my daily pageview stats for the end of last week when I put the posts on Facebook and LinkedIn:
If I can get that kind of effect by an ill-planned, one-off campaign with very little foundation, you can start to see why smart companies are waking up to the power of social networking. Imagine what you could do with:
- A sustained campaign,
- professionally planned and executed,
- leveraging much larger networks,
- with better content.
Kind of makes you start to think, doesn’t it?
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2 Responses to “Leveraging Social Networks”
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Linkedin was included into the About.com Top 10 employment site list…linkedin is still the only social network on the list though…..the newest 3 on the list are-
http://www.linkedin.com (professional networking)
http://www.indeed.com (aggregated listings)
http://www.realmatch.com (matches you to the perfect job)
Complete top 10 job site list here:
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm
Judith,
Thanks for the comment and the job site list. There’s plenty in there to sift through. Realmatch in particular sounds interesting.
I had read an article a while back listing a couple other professional networking sites:
http://www.ziggs.com and
http://www.zoominfo.com
I never got around to checking them out, and in the end decided there are only so many hours in the day and stuck with LinkedIn. If you or anyone out there has any insight on either of these sites, please leave a comment with your observations.