Why Social Media? a plea to those still unconvinced

I made the case (I hope) that traditional, offline business networking is great, and I take nothing away from that activity. But how do you supplement that networking in between conferences, seminars and trade shows? If you only network a few times a year, how do you expect to really build the kind of professional connections that will help you, as a business person, and your company? Collecting a few business cards and coming back to the office satisfied with the outcome just doesn’t seem realistic to me. Maybe 10, 20 years ago, but not in this era of so many online networking tools available to us.

Take a look at the slides I linked to above, and let me know what you think. Is this approach a strong way to help social networking non-believers get over that doubt that online networking should play a part in their professional lives?

You can see some of the results, both good and bad, but always beneficial in knowing what your current brand perception and customer feedback is at any given time. SocialMention.com also gives a read of the type of mentions, which they call Sentiment, the Keywords that frequently appear in the mentions, and some percentages of Strength, Passion, and Reach. SocialMention.com even lets you set up email alerts for the names you wish to track, so that you don’t have to visit the site at all — just open the alerts in your email each morning. Give it a try!