It is no secret that good relationships are the key to success in business. But in our increasingly online and virtual world, where relationships are more often than not conducted on Facebook and Twitter, it can be easy to forget the power inherent in a well-conducted business lunch.

Author Robin Jay does a great job of reminding us what an important business and relationship tool a professional lunch can be in this sincere and illuminating book. Though the idea of eating in front of someone you don’t know can be anxiety-inducing for some, Jay makes a convincing argument that the potential rewards more than outweigh the possible risks.

This book covers every detail of the business lunch transaction and the appropriate way to proceed when taking clients to lunch, from someone who clearly knows what she is talking about. Pointers include picking up clients for a first lunch (to make it easier on them and to avoid any confusion at the restaurant), how to discreetly pay for the lunch (including the smooth trick of paying in advance so that you can impress your guest by having taken care of everything), and a helpful list of things and topics to avoid (alcohol and politics).

Though the purpose of the business lunch is clearly to improve your success and your bottom line, the author never comes off as caring only about making money off of the people she takes to lunch. To the contrary, it is clear that her success in her field came about because she truly came to like and care about the people with whom she was developing business relationships, and her willingness to be a listening ear and a friend, through foul weather and through fair. If you are looking for a way to rejuvenate your client base and to close more deals, this is definitely a book you should read and take to heart. (Get your copy here!)

Article Source:  Sarah Beek

Many often wonder about whether social media is scalable, especially in light of the benefits social media delivers in terms of connections between businesses and their customers. In fact, as I noted here at the Huffington Post, social media is a return to what the neighborhood restaurant or “Mom and Pop” business has always done to succeed: maintain and strengthen relationships with customers.

If you are embarking on the use of social media as a trend or because you think it is the new media platform that can replicate what you used to do it is worth remembering that even 300 million televisions in American homes can’t fully bring a brand to life. If your focus is all about scale, reach, impressions and size, then you may be missing the benefits of the emerging era of real, interactive Web connections that enable businesses to have meaningful and valued relationships with its customers and other stakeholders. Proceeding down the old route may be just as likely to inflame customers as you are to induce them.

However, if you are thinking about social media from a customer centric perspective and looking at it as a means to transform your business of today with the intimacy of the Mom and Pop shop of the old days, then you may be thinking about how to also reach this state across a large scale operation. Just as a TV – or two or three – in every home doesn’t guarantee brand intimacy, neither does a computer – or two or three — in every house and all your office desks, lap, or hand for that matter.

So as long as we remember that intimacy, sincerity and customer relationships come first when we talk about social media, lets take a look at how size matters.

When the telephone was first invented and deployed, it was only for the few. Many could not imagine its use, or ubiquity – let alone business applicability, or even reliance. Today the telephone (wired and wireless) have become ubiquitous, full-featured – voice mail, conference calls, call forwarding etc – and virtually every business employee has one or two.

At Dell, we are scaling our social media capabilities across the business much like telephones became just a part of how you do business and connect with people you need to be in touch with to do a better job. Here are some of the principles we are following:

• Listening is a critical first step for any solid relationship. Through listening, identify the topics people are talking about. Those solid listening skills are best deployed in making sure the topics of conversation across the Web are routed to the people in your organization who should be aware of them.
• Think of the telephone operator who connected calls throughout your business or across town – before we put a phone on everyone’s desk and enabled direct dialing. Those telephone operators made sure to connect the conversations on the Web to the relevant part of your business.
• Getting plugged in and connected takes relevant customer clusters and puts them in touch with relevant parts of your business. This turns what was a massive, real-time, moving conversation, into a number of meaningful, substantive, manageable opportunities where business experts can listen learn and engage real time, bringing value and customer insight to what they do.
• What seemed more like a party line or a bad connection becomes individually connected calls.
• We adhere to a governance model that embeds social media across the enterprise – product and engineering teams, customer and tech support, sales, marketing, HR and more.
• What could be intimate, but may not scale, is the operator being expected to answer everyone.

By scaling social media with these tenets in mind, we can listen and communicate through “people-to-people” interactions that are relevant and personalized. As Chris Brogan advises, “People want the warm touch” and we expect to get even better at recognizing and embracing returning visitors to Dell.com, offering them personalized recommendations based on their previous behavior, connecting with them on Twitter and thanking our customers on a more consistent basis.

Applying these lessons to any business or brand of any size proves intimacy has value and brings a brand to life. Social media allows companies who follow these principles to learn and engage daily to build a better, bigger business and strong relationships with customers.

Article Source:  Social Media & Building Relationships

Your business goal on Twitter is to provide customers with what they want and need. To do so, you need to develop relationships with your core 20% clientele base/joint venture folks and to develop trust and earn a reputation for being the go-to business for the other 80% in your niche.

Developing trust and relationships takes time and is based on a bit more than spamming sales pitches. Therefore, if relationship building is the goal, self-serving tweets should be in the minority. Alternate kinds of tweets fall into a limited number of categories.

The Other Kinds of Tweets

• Questions: Asking questions is a great possibility, though there is an art to asking questions that can reasonably be addressed in 140 characters.

• Humor: One can of course inject a bit of tasteful humor or respond to humor.

• Retweets: Retweeting others’ tweets compliments and benefits both the tweeter and the retweeter as long as the frequency of retweets is not overdone. In moderation, a retweet forms an independent witness to the value of the original tweet.

• Thanks: Expressing genuine gratitude or praise is always a good thing too.

• Useful Stuff: Then there is the plethora of news, quotes, and tips which may be interesting or useful to the reader. Some of it should be self-serving (or you are in the wrong business).

• Links: Include tweets with links to continue the conversation on blogs and announcements of webinars and conferences. Links can also be to further helpful information related to words that comprise the rest of the tweet. Various services exist to shorten URL’s so as to take up fewer of the 140 character limit Twitter has established.

• Engage in their conversations: Address their concerns. Be a listener. Don’t just talk. Answer questions if you have a ready answer or can readily research an answer.

Frequency of Tweets

Another issue important to developing relationships is the number of times each tweet is given. I’m not talking about the stuff you do for individuals once, but there are tweets that can be given multiple times. The question is how many without turning into annoying spam.

I am thinking of four factors to consider.

One, your followers are not always on Twitter at the time you are tweeting. Repeating a tweet at different times of day increases the chances your followers will see your tweet.

Second, consider which time zones your want to reach. Tweeting when your target audience is most likely to be asleep or busy elsewhere is not wise. Lunch time, evenings, and weekends often are better times.

Third, tweets will pass by the eyes of your followers at different rates depending on how many people your followers are following. One of your followers with a hundred followers will not see as many tweets flying by as a person following five thousand. For a given tweet, you can look like a spammer to the one following a hundred at the same time that you barely register on the radar of someone following five thousand. Striking a moderate balance between extremes is important.

Four, be persistent over a long period. Sooner or later most of your followers will become familiar with you. If your persistence consists in spam, your followers will drop out, but a with bit of creativity in providing real value, persistence pays off.

Article Source:  Twitter For Business