Am I Media – Are You?

I have been reading the following posts about Facebook; the first one was Robert Scoble is Media as posted by my friend Sebastien Provencher who was blogging about the second post I have been reading tonight by Robert Scoble – titled Why Facebook, Why Now?

The profound statement coming from Sebastien was the fact that he considers himself “MEDIA”. This completely makes sense to me – if in fact you share information and use the Internet as a way to distribute that information. In this case, I suppose I am considered media as well.

This got me thinking – how can local businesses get involved with this. When I was with KS2 Solutions – I spent a lot of time coaching businesses that information can be a powerful tool to increase the number of relationships they have. These relationships, when nurtured properly will pay some very handsome dividends through word of mouth and referral marketing.

This was the strategy we used at KS2. We did not have a large marketing budget to do traditional advertising; however, what we did have was knowledge – knowledge that other people were willing to take time to listen to. So we starting blogging (many of those posts actually exist on this blog), holding seminars and doing an incredible amount of networking. However, we never asked for business in those forums, we simply provided information – we never tried to connect this type of networking with selling – those were two distinctive processes.

It worked well, our referral business grew and it had a direct impact our bottom line. We doubled revenue from 2003 to 2004 and then again in 2005 before we were finally bought out.

Now that I think back to what we did from 2002-2005 – facebook would have a been another forum for us to provide information. Facebook and other social networking sites – really do have the potential to help the individual blogger, small businesses and even large businesses if they act in a manner that is cooperative and knowledge based and not sales based – you might be very surprised at what comes of it.