Social Networking features seem to be all the rage these days. But how do you incorporate them into your business strategy?

The answers are probably more diverse than you would think. For one thing, Social Networks have done several things.

1. Social Networks have brought together people that had been separated by time and distance.
2. They have created simple ways for people to share their interests (Social, Recreation and Business).
3. They have created a new user experience. Not only have they brought people together, but they have helped to define a new User Interface (the way a user interacts with the computer). The most popular sites on the internet are not about great graphics, but about simple ways to get and share information.
4. They shown people both the advantages and disadvantages of joining a website
5. People have become accustom to "following" the activities of others.
6. These networks have created alternate ways for people to get updates about people, interests, products and services.

There are a number of ways that you can take advantage of the Social Networking Legacy in your business.

• Provide ways for people to share your site. Put links on every page that allows people that have come across your website to Like it or share it with their friends.
• Create other ways for people to follow you. At a minimum create Facebook and Twitter pages so people can follow you and then put links to those accounts on your main web site.
• When you add or update information on your main web site do the same on your Social Network accounts.
• Simplify your user interface. Heavy graphics or fancy Flash animations do nothing to drive traffic to your site,  create customers or retain them
• Create RSS feeds so people that come to your site have ways to follow your updates directly
• Create relationships with customers by giving them ways to join your website for support, special offers or community. 
• Add content to your site regularly. Give people a reason to follow your updates.

Using these and other techniques can have a significant effect on both driving traffic to your site and building customer relationships. For an example of how some of these features have been used, take a look at our portfolio here:  http://www.nsage.com/Portfolio.aspx

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If you have looked through the portal, you will have noticed a whole bunch of little orange icon. These are RSS feeds. We use these for our blogs, groups, forums and uploaded materials.

If you click on the icon, it brings you to a page that you can use to grab the latest items for that category. You can use that page to have other programs and services such as Outlook, My Yahoo and Google reader automatically fetch these for you. This allows you to get feeds from multiple sources and keep updated on all of them in one place.

This video gives a brief description of what RSS is and how you can use it.

 

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I thought this was interesting

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I have been burning the midnight oil for the last week or so getting a new design and some new social networking features ready for the American Agent Network portal site.

Social networking is something that has become extremely important for businesses in today’s world. It is THE new way to do business.

Sure great sales people always did this. It's called their sphere of influence. With the tools available on the Internet today, it becomes much easier to expose yourself to not just your immediate sphere of influence, but your second and third generation spheres of influence. What I mean by that is that with the technologies and ever growing set of communication tools available today your sphere of influence can deliver your credentials easier to their sphere who can then deliver out agin to their sphere.

Think of moons revolving around planets which revolve around stars which revolve around galaxies.

You are the galaxy.

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