Small Business Blog

First, if you have colleagues that could benefit from generating sales leads and tracking their business networking activities, please do them a favor and forward them this blog.

Social media for business is peaking with 86% percent of professionals reporting to use social media for business… except… nobody really knows exactly how their business is benefiting from social media.

“While the survey results are great in that they indicate an enhanced role social media in many industries, it also indicated that some professionals or companies are adopting social technologies without having a way to actually measure how effective or useful the measures actually are.”

Christina Warren, Mashable

Of course this really rustles my feathers. We’ve focused on sales and tracking since the beginning. Referral Key has had ROI built in since day one. We are really hoping that more professionals get serious about driving revenue using social media and consider tracking their professional relationships.

Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are great but remember, their usefulness as a ’sales’ tool is only a byproduct of people wishing it to be so. These tools weren’t conceived or built with driving revenue as the primary objective which is why everyone’s playing the “What’s the return?” game. Generating sales leads and referral marketing are the next frontier for online business networking. We think you agree too:

hmmmmm… someday someone will develop a network with a focus on sales and tracking.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under Business 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.