I’ve participated in business networks in Central Virginia, and I personally know maybe 60 people.
Of those, I may have done business with half.

Of that half, I’ve been to their homes, their social functions and their place of business.

We can’t really say that about 99.9% of our online connections…although some people do meetup “IRL”, I’m sure it’s with a small fraction of their total network size.

Now, when we consider the trust factor as a positive benefit of initiating and perpetuating business transactions, it would seem that the real-world network would have an advantage.

The truth of the matter is that the trust factor can be earned in various ways. If that were not the case, no one would ever buy stuff sight-unseen on Amazon and eBay. Nobody would ever hire a freelancer without having been to her office. You get the picture.

Where we fall down is in trying to map the methods of real-world networking onto the virtual-world networks without making allowances for the differences inherent in the networks. Since some of the methods are common to both types of networks, we may not realize that the other methods fail because of being a poor fit; instead, we blame our implementation of the methods.

One key example is reciprocity. Face-to-face, it is hard to look at someone who helped you and refuse to do a similar deed in return.
Online, that is much easier to do. Yet we assume that we must have done something wrong when our good deeds go unrewarded.

Another example on the flip side is the practice of disseminating awesome content for free. This isn’t a reciprocal-inducing act; it’s a list-building tactic and a aggressive assertion of authority. Website owners know that this practice is not as potent as it once was, but it is still effective enough to help reach online goals.

Now, consider someone at a small luncheon meeting distributing an 80-page, spiral-bound document on the benefits of direct marketing.
Ho-hum, nobody’s going to read it! No matter how good the content is, the participants are inundated with materials from ALL the other participants. So, it all becomes a pile of “stuff I got at the meeting”.

The reason this doesn’t work well at such meetings has to do with “push” vs. “pull”. Pushing content on people is not as effective as having them pull it from you by request.

Ultimately, we have to evaluate our goals for each network, like Iain mentioned, above.

Cheers,

Mitch

Thanks for stopping by and sharing your principles.

Cheers,

Mitch

The principles I try to use for any given site are:
1) Is this site itself a good match for my business?
2) Will anyone on this site be interested in me and/or my business?
3) Does this site “feel right”, am I comfortable in using it – both technically and gut instinct.

If I get three yes’s I give it a go and then ask myself the same questions a short while later.

As I use Twitter, I find that I do care what 80% of the snippets are about and, it’s super easy to ignore the other 20%.

Cheers,

Mitch

You are going to laugh at this one: less than six hours after writing this post and telling myself to go on a Social Diet, I spent ten minutes creating a macro for PhraseExpress (yet another gadget) that loads the web page when I highlight a tinyurl in the newsreader and click a hot-key!

I guess I’m going to have to wean myself off of these things, slowly.

Cheers,

Mitch