It’s official, we’re in a recession. Technology might help us to work smarter by extending the networking we do in-person into the virtual world of social networking sites such as Facebook, blogging and mini-messaging service Twitter. Opportunities to do business can arise online as well as in-person.

Writing blogs allows you to showcase your knowledge to your readers and to receive their feedback, potentially letting customers know exactly what you could do for them but also allowing you to build up a knowledge bank for the staff in your company to use too. Once you have a collection of articles your new readers can search and sort them to find just what they are looking for.

Twitter allows you to enter short messages like text messages that will be read by all the people who opt to ‘follow’ you. You can easily use this to publicise your networking events, company events, new projects and also to ask questions of the other users. Tapping into the resources available from others in your network could allow you to solve your customers problems and answer their questions quickly and help you to find partners and associates to work with to win more business. Of course you may just want to follow all the celebrity twitterers…

Facebook is a social netowrking site that allows you to keep in touch with all your friends and family but there is no reason you cannot also use it to keep in touch with business associates, as long as you are sensible of not posting embarrassing images from your university days!

For a business-only version of social networking you could also try Ecademy. It features similar messaging and profile building features to those on Facebook, but it is orientated towards business-people. There are regional groups that enable you to carry on networking in the real world monthly or weekly. Ecademy is big, and it is global so if your company trades outside the Uk this might be a point in its favour.

If you would like help setting up a blog or using Ecademy please call us on 01962 737989.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Business tips, Create Design Studio Services. 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.