11 ways to create connection evangelists to help you grow your connections. One of the things I have been doing more on a concious level is connecting with people I already know.
These are people on Facebook, LinkedIn and who are in my address book. I must confess that I haven’t been that active in staying in touch with people. Yes, I have a few of my closest networking buddies, just haven’t expanded my network too much.
With all the talk about all the new social networking platforms, we need to ask ourselves, just because everyone else is doing it, does it mean it’s a fit for us?
One of the questions on Focus was – Is anyone scaling back their connections and how are we managing our activity? One of the things we all agreed on, was getting caught up in the Social Media Frenzy – and that the most all of us can really have a good connection with is about 2,500 people. This includes, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Of course we may have groups that we really enjoy.
LinkedIn, for the most part I have let go over 20 groups that I used to belong to..and joined other discussion groups like Social Media Empire, Focus or Quora.
How can we stay in touch more often with our connections and create more supportive people around us?
Get rid of self- promotion, pull more people to us by offering incentives, ask people to opt-in to our conversations – this is where the discussion groups come into play. We are going to promote some things about what we offer, or promote an event however, it’s not about always showcasing our own stuff. Promote other people and their work too!
Pretend you don’t have a marketing budget (some of us don’t have one) to spend on ads, direct mail, as the money we spend in promoting and marketing ourselves won’t earn goodwill. Instead, partner up with people do promote each other i.e. A blog challenge. Focus on creating connection loyalty. These connectors are the ones who will become your evangelists, they will help you connect to someone who can help you, give a good word for you, or even recommend you.
Deepen these relationships, these people will help you to get leads for you. Evangelists will help you seek out customers, who are willing to take a look at what you have to offer and will keep your marketing costs down. These evangelists will do things for the right reason ans share the word of you and others that you word with.
We all agree that getting feedback from people is important – this is why you will see surveys, polls and feedback questions and comments. When we don’t have a marketing budget to spend, there are many free resources that we can use to get feedback from people. Usually just asking and listening to the responses that we get back will give us the answers. We may not like or we may like the answers we get back.
For example, in one of my newsletters I did for a couple of years, I had asked a survey what my readers want more of…the comments I got back was to have more polls and surveys. What did I do, I created a survey…I had people opting out and no one answered my survey. What do you think I got from this feedback?
Whether you have customers or connections – silent, unhappy ones usually dump you, never to call again. For every person that complains about you don’t.
What sort of things can we do to encourage more evangelists?
1. Believe in your connections/people
2. Focus on continual improvement
3. Don’t spend a vast amount of money
4. Ask for referrals and help often – people like to help
5. Use technology to help you
6. Share the feedback with people
7. Be valuable by helping your connections to get what they want
8. What are your connections saying about you? Keep the conversations positive
9. Make a real connection with people call them up – meet for coffee or take them out to lunch
10. Interview the people you would like to know more about
11. Share the Buzz about a few connections at a time
