Lead Generation: Social Networking and Web 2.0

Social Networking and Web2.0 - these are among the latest buzzwords which you’ll be hearing a lot of if you aren’t already. If you are at all engaged in current developments, you have probably heard about these by now and are aware that social networking sites are a type of website which aim to bring together people with similar interests. Among the most heavily used of these sites are LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook.

For website owners, there is something to be noted here - wherever there are people, there is an opportunity to generate traffic for their website. The idea here if you want to generate traffic is to build a community of people who may be interested in the products or services you provide and getting them to visit your site in order to learn more. For business lead generation, there are a few obstacles to overcome along the way.

Firstly, the target audience is very often in the sub-30 age group. If your product or service is aimed at HR managers who tend to be aged 35-40+, pretty conservative and aren’t necessarily trawling Myspace all the time, then you may not actually be able to generate very high-quality content by using this type of technique.

These users are also notoriously difficult to sell to. They will be resistant to any hard sell tactics; take a gentle approach and be subtle when introducing them to your business rather than just hitting them with a sales pitch right off the bat. Having the right product is paramount here, as is the ability to mobilise social networking users to visit your site and to learn more about it.

My colleague Nick Schoonen has a blog (rczero.com) which is target towards remote control enthusiasts - remote control planes, cars and so on. He also has a plan to monetize the site; while I won’t get into that here, I will mention that he has been very successful at using social networking to drive traffic to his site. The reason that he has been such a success at this is that the audience he is going for is more or less the same one as is to be found on these social networking sites.

Let’s suppose that your service was rubbish removal. It’s pretty hard to imagine setting up a community on Myspace all around rubbish removal and hope to get people to your site, because people frankly aren’t interested in that unless they have a need for it right at that moment.

To summarise, in the business lead generation, or business traffic generation area, I think that social networking sites are less dollar productive than most of the other strategies we we’re talking about today. If you had to decide, I would suggest focusing on other strategies first.