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Social Networking Beyond BNI Meetings

The importance of integrating online social marketing.

By Tom Heatherington, BNI Montana – Flathead Valley

Our BNI chapter meets every Tuesday morning at 7:00am, but the networking between our members doesn’t stop when we adjourn. Our members are actively involved in social networking, specifically learning how to optimize their businesses online.

As education director and our chapter’s “token geek,” our morning discussions have often focused on online social networking. This is a logical transition as we are in BNI to network with other businesses; expanding our sphere of influence via online networking sites does nothing but reinforce these efforts.

Because my company is involved in social media marketing and search engine optimization, our chapter members have been receiving weekly information about these topics as a result of my 60-Second Commercials. Collectively, we decided to incorporate these practices into our chapter to extend our networking opportunities.

We developed our local BNI website (www.bniflatheadvalley.com) to serve two purposes. It showcases each member’s company, including business description, contact information, Google map, social media links (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). Most members also have an embedded YouTube video where they introduce their products and services in a similar format to our 60-Second Commercials.

Secondly, this page provides additional “Google juice” in that it is indexed by the search engines. And the links from this site help to reinforce our members’ primary websites. Additionally, the YouTube video descriptions include links to their websites, which is one of the best one-way links to have. We also use this as a recruiting tool because in addition to reinforcing our local networking efforts, all videos contain a BNI testimonial.

Take Your Cue from BNI
If you are uncertain how to begin an online social networking program, take your cue from BNI’s activity. When visiting the BNI website we see links to BNI’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, and Dr. Misner and other employees of BNI corporate are active Twitter users.

Today, networking with like-minded associates and prospective customers involves more than meeting in person once a week. With the surge in popularity of social media, every business needs to be involved with online networking if they want to keep pace with their clients.

Short History of Networking Online
Whether they understand it or not, everyone is aware of Facebook and Twitter. Few people realize that social networking as we know it today began in 1997 with a website called SixDegrees. It allowed users to send messages and post bulletins to people within their first three degrees of connection.

Friendster.com launched in 2002, MySpace appeared in 2004, and Facebook surpassed MySpace as the largest social networking site in the USA in 2009. During this same timeframe, other sites like Hi5, LinkedIn, Multiply, Orkut, Ning and literally hundreds of other social networking websites proliferated the Internet.

The rules are changing and businesses must keep up with what is developing and take advantage of it so that they can connect with their audience in more meaningful ways. All one needs to do to appreciate the impact of social networking and social media marketing is to consider some facts that are mindboggling in their significance.

Did You Know?
There is a series of YouTube videos entitled “Did You Know?” that address the progression of information technology on how we communicate, network with each other, and entertain ourselves.

Did you know the following?

80 percent of the total adult population of the U.S. is on the Internet.

93 percent of all adults own a cell phone.

Mobile devices will become the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet.

In 2006 there were 2.7 billion searches on Google every month.

Today there are more than 31 billion searches every month.

It is estimated that 70 percent of all searches are for local information.

Americans spend 30 percent of their leisure time online.

One in five of the world’s Internet users visit YouTube each day.

YouTube is the second largest searched website.

Optimizing a Website
A business website is the hub of your online universe where most of your effort should be focused on developing relationships.

It used to be that merely having a website guaranteed some visitors with little or no online promotion. But that was a few hundred-billion websites ago. Today the competition in every niche is fierce, and the need for search engine optimization (SEO) is of utmost importance.

Optimizing a website means making it search engine friendly. This is done by tweaking numerous webpage components that instruct the search engine “spiders” as to what a particular page is about.

Optimization is also something that is done off-site with the sole purpose of driving traffic to your main website. Today we call this social media marketing, utilizing external websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Ning, and other social networking resources with the common objective of creating new paths to your website.

SEO is no longer a discretionary consideration; a website that has not been optimized is analogous to having an unlisted business phone number. Unlike most website related chores, SEO and social media marketing can be accomplished in-house with the right guidance and knowledge.

Tom Heatherington has been involved with the commercial sector of the Internet since he co-founded one of the first ISPs in 1993. He is an Internet entrepreneur, marketing consultant and author of the recently released “SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide,” available through his website www.TheInternetBook.com.

Tags: 60-Second Commercial, December 2010 Edition, online social networking