Your Social Graph: why it’s important

If you can remem­ber the pre-GPS , pre-Mapquest or Google maps days you know how frus­trat­ing it was to try to find where ever it was you were going espe­cially if that place changed locations…without telling you where they moved to. I remem­ber those days well, nav­i­gat­ing more by instinct than any­thing else.

Luck­ily, things have changed, at least in the brick and mor­tar world because of GPS . How­ever, the same is not all that true for the on-line world. Far to many busi­nesses approach their web pres­ence like they did their brick and mor­tar store front, using adver­tis­ing, direct mail and gen­er­ally what has come to be called “Hope Mar­ket­ing”. “Hope Mar­ket­ing” is sim­i­lar to play­ing blind­folded darts… a toss and a hope of hit­ting the target.

So, not being prone to change,  small busi­nesses have approached the on-line world, by tak­ing the same actions over and over and expect­ing dif­fer­ent results. When they expe­ri­ence the same results,  they give up,  chalk­ing their fail­ure up to the inter­net being a toy not wor­thy of adult use. Their fail­ure illus­trates the absence of a  wider and deeper field of view…they actu­ally need to search out and engage poten­tial buy­ers, instead of the eas­ier option of blind hope.

If you remem­ber last week I said that your HUB is the most impor­tant part of your inter­net pres­ence, it is where peo­ple come to buy from, inter­act with and gen­er­ally check you out. So not start­ing here would be a strate­gic error, because build­ing a net­work  before or in place of a hub soon becomes a web of inter­con­nect­ed­ness  that doesn’t bring folks back to you, and by back to you I mean a cen­tral place that is asso­ci­ated with you and you alone.

For exam­ple,  hav­ing an Etsy shop, or a Big Car­tel shop or  any of the sev­eral other options doesn’t qual­ify, because  it does not have  a way to guide your poten­tial buy­ers to a cen­tral deci­sion mak­ing point…your home base. As a result, you can waste valu­able time and resources that will not serve poten­tial buy­ers well, by deny­ing them the oppor­tu­nity to make an informed choice.

So  your HUB, and all of its’ com­po­nents is there to receive and guide poten­tial buy­ers com­ing from your networks.

Caveat alert :

If you are  not inter­ested in repeat buy­ers, what I’ve just out­lined may not work for you, but if you are try­ing to build a net­work of col­lec­tors then pay attention.

Back to our program..

Last week I men­tioned that  blogs work so well because they are both easy to use and search engine friendly. The other and prob­a­bly more impor­tant rea­son is, they give you the chance to inter­act with poten­tial buy­ers in much the same way as if you had a brick and mor­tar store front. And, like a store front that inter­ac­tion occurs within your brand, adding more cred­i­bil­ity and trust to you, and in turn ele­vat­ing  your posi­tion in the minds of your buyers.

That about fin­ishes up the Hub bucket, let’s move on to the Social media one next.

The web you spin or what’s up with the social graph

In a nut shell, social media/networking is both a com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­duit and a way to let peo­ple out in the world know you have some­thing they might be inter­ested in. It is also more than that, it is your key to build­ing trust and in turn rela­tion­ships with like minded peo­ple. Social networks/media are the best way  to share your work and your brand with poten­tial buy­ers and point them them back to your Hub. So for social media to really be use­ful you’ll need to think of it as a way to:

• Find your ideal buyers
• Con­nect with them so they can get to know, like and trust you
• Dis­close to the greater world that have some pretty entic­ing solu­tions to com­mon problems.
• Let them know how they can explore your work in all of its’ glory, by show­ing them the way back to your hub so they can make their own deci­sions regard­ing your work.

The social media/networking bucket

The graphic above rep­re­sents my social net­work on Face­book as of 7–31-10. The orange, red and turquoise clus­ters rep­re­sent my pri­mary con­nec­tions with pho­tog­ra­phers, the dark blue clus­ter rep­re­sents a mix of con­nec­tions mostly clients, poten­tial future clients etc. the scat­tered pur­ple clus­ter rep­re­sents artists con­nected to this blog. The loose small clus­ters and sin­gle names rep­re­sent sin­gle or very lim­ited interconnectedness.

While there are many social media/networking tools avail­able today, there are really only two that work best to  con­nect to your Hub and  dis­trib­ute infor­ma­tion to and from your hub and your net­work. Those two are, Face­book and Twit­ter, both allow you to mul­ti­ply your mes­sage to a mag­ni­tude never before expe­ri­enced. More­over, when work­ing in con­junc­tion with your Hub they offer you the abil­ity to not only be seen by more peo­ple, but also expe­ri­ence a higher poten­tial for find­ing and engag­ing  those look­ing for what you have to offer.

The crit­i­cal point here is to know the dif­fer­ence between just reach­ing many peo­ple and  reach­ing and engag­ing  the right peo­ple. The old add men approach was gam­bling, their bets were their adds, win­ning or los­ing depended on the ad’s abil­ity grab our atten­tion and con­vince and con­vince us we needed what­ever it was they were adver­tis­ing. Today, the goal is not to con­vince, instead the objec­tive is to find those peo­ple who are look­ing for the solu­tion you offer, then engage them in ways that empower them to take a look at you and  in the end make their own deci­sions. And that’s where your hub is impor­tant, it helps peo­ple you’ve found through social net­works know just how well you meet their needs, no con­vinc­ing needed.

The video below shows inter­ac­tively how my net­work on Face­book looks, it was cre­ated using touch graph for face­book. The link will take you to the appli­ca­tion on Face­book, enter your info and you’ll get to see how far and deep your net­work con­nec­tions are. The clus­ters show com­mon inter­ests and likes, each time I mouse over a friend their con­nec­tions are high­lighted show­ing how my con­nec­tion to her also con­nects me to her friends.  This depth gives us far greater knowl­edge about our entire net­work of con­nec­tions than has ever been avail­able. Using this infor­ma­tion we can see the com­mon links around shared inter­ests and val­ues among those in our net­work, mak­ing it eas­ier for us to find the buy­ers best suited for what we have to offer. While social net­works don’t pro­vide guar­an­tees they do sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the risks pre­vi­ously asso­ci­ated with sell­ing our work.

Now that we have that down let’s look at the two prime candidates.

Face­book

With 500 mil­lion users, Face­book is a great tool for artists to meet the cri­te­ria men­tioned above, so long as it is not used exclu­sively as your hub. Using Face­book as a hub lim­its your abil­ity to build con­nec­tions out­side of Facebook’s gates and more impor­tantly, does not meet the require­ments of a Hub I talked about in the last install­ment of this series.

That said, it is entirely up to you, just know the lim­i­ta­tions you are putting on your busi­ness. So long as Face­book or for that mat­ter any tool, meets the needs of your busi­ness then use it as long as it works. Every tool has its’ pur­pose and ignor­ing that pur­pose also results in less than opti­mal outcomes…so make your deci­sions with your eyes wide open.

Twit­ter, tweets and twaddle

Twitter’s evo­lu­tion has gone from a col­lec­tive “WTF?” to a heav­ily used tool for build­ing strong net­works, due largely to its’ sim­plic­ity. It has also helped re-humanize how busi­nesses con­nect with their  buy­ers  and in that con­text it is a tool that should not be ignored… and no it is not about what I had for breakfast.

Twitter’s util­ity lies in the com­plex­ity and result­ing reach of the net­works its’ savvy users can cre­ate. If you have a thou­sand fol­low­ers and each of your fol­low­ers has a thou­sand, and their fol­low­ers have a sim­i­lar amount…you can see how far your mes­sage can reach. More impor­tantly, if you have focused on fol­low­ers who fit your niche mar­ket the vast­ness of your result­ing net­work has even more power to help you find the peo­ple your work was meant for.

The reach achiev­able by Twit­ter, is not yet there for Face­book pri­mar­ily because Facebook’s closed nature and inter­nal lim­its  on users. How­ever, while Face­book could func­tion as a hub Twit­ter fails that test.

The video below is a dynamic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my Twit­ter con­nec­tions, watch as i click on indi­vid­ual pro­file pho­tos and see how their net­work expands reveal­ing even more com­plex­ity for the net­work. I used Twit­ter Friends Browser to illus­trate the net­work, click the link and give it a try.

Fur­ther­more, the time required to build a strong net­work on Twit­ter, at least in my expe­ri­ence, is not as much as non-believers would have you believe. Twit­ter can be suc­cess­fully used to carry your mes­sage from your Hub to your net­work and back with lit­tle effort.

Want to know how to put social media/networking together with your hub? I’ll cover that in the next installment…

Stay up to date with this series fol­low the links below:

• The Sum­mer of Love and the hippie-dippy busi­ness model
• The Age of Confusion
• What I learned from Alice, a Cru­civer­bal­ist and Sputnik
• Your vis­i­bil­ity Tool Kit
• The Heart of Your Business