Radio Free Enterprise

Networking of all kinds fascinates me. Whether it be business networking groups like BNI, network marketing companies like Mary Kay or Isagenix, or social networking applications like MySpace and LinkedIn, this type of distributed messaging really piques my interest.

While researching a post on the use of social networking sites for marketing purposes, I came across a company that is not only doing it but teaching others how to supercharge their sales through the intelligent use of these sites. They’ve even coined the term Social Marketing.

Stomper Net has posted this video as a viral marketing device for their services. Whether or not you choose to employ their services, I highly recommend you spend a few minutes watching it.

The first few minutes are a little hypey, and the animation is a little cutesy, but once you get to the statistics on the growth of social networking sites and how marketers are using them to explode traffic on their sites, the video becomes nothing short of compelling.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Recent posts have gone from monkey to donkey, and now I’m moving from TWiT to Twitter.

I am seriously investigating Social Networking as it relates to Small Business Marketing. I’ve been on LinkedIn for a couple of years and am now experimenting with FaceBook, MySpace and, most recently, Twitter.

As with all Social Networking tools, Twitter can be a little difficult to explain to those of us who were born before 1990.

In a nutshell, Twitter allows you to let everyone in your group of friends know what you are doing from minute to minute.

This may not sound appealing to those of us who feel the Internet age has left us naked from a privacy standpoint. Sadly, this is something that we’re all just going to have to accept and, in my opinion embrace, since the idea of personal privacy is not just going the way of the Dodo bird, it’s already long gone. And Twitter is less invasive than many other Internet information sources. What you post about your life and actions is up to you. You only need tell the people you want to tell, what you want to share, when you want to share it. Some people go crazy, posting info ever time they have a meal or leave the house. Puh-leeze resist the urge to do this.

Instead, look at Twitter as a great free tool to help stay top-of-mind with your sphere of influence. Twitter posts are short text messages (limited to 140 characters) which can include links back to your blog, website, ecommerce site, etc. which can also potentially increase your page rank on Google. I have just started “Tweeting” but intend to tweet every time I post something on my blog or do something else I think the folks following me will be interested in knowing.

Just for kicks, why not set up your own Twitter account and choose to follow my actions. I’ll do the same for you and we’ll figure out whether this thing has any longterm value together.