The Great Social Media Experiment

Partly inspired by Sean McPheat’s book ‘eselling^®’ and partly by my ‘Diary of a Sales Manager’ column on Modernselling.com (all one article of it), I decided to put my money where my mouth is and start the Great Social Media Experiment at the very end of October 2011.

The idea was to use LinkedIn and Twitter to identify prospective customers and to engage them in a non-sales way so that, if and when, they are looking for something I can supply, they are already aware of me.

In a nutshell, I joined the (closed) World Steel Professionals group on LinkedIn with the idea of working through the membership list and following anyone who has a Twitter feed.  (I had already set up a steel-related Twitter account (twitter.com/neilfsteel) for those of you who care.)

The plan was also to contribute to any relevant discussions – this has proved to be very difficult when the ‘discussions’ are of the type:

Hello, i’m looking raex 300 3 x 1530 x 3700

Hiring for Purchasing Manager needed – Russia at. Like this post, spread the word.

Looking for serious buyers of Titanium Sponge TGTV – approx 70 tonnes at Rotterdam warehouse – sizes from 0-12 mm to 50-80 mm – please email for details

Building steel plant is very interesting task! Optimization which equipments to start up by is another great task!!

This last one is from a guy who posts stuff like this a couple of times a week and whose profile includes “Seeking global career/16 Years /Steel/Refractory/Business Devolepment (sic)/Marketing/Steel Production/Production Management”  Kudos to him for trying to show some thought leadership in a bid to attract a new employer but…

The whole thing has all turned a bit academic as I was roundly chastised by my boss a couple of months ago for ‘wasting too much time on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook’ and an immediate halt to proceedings ordered.

A few interesting observations along the way

·        Some people on LI will invite you to connect to them just because you looked at their profile and belong to one or more of the same groups (yes, in the spirit of the experiment, I did accept all 13 or so of them.)

·        About 5% of people in this LI group have a Twitter address on their profile.

·        About 13% of the people I followed on Twitter followed me back.

Has this been a useful exercise? Yes.  Would I do it again? Yes, unequivocally.

It’s disappointing that the initial groundwork hasn’t been built on but it’s encouraging that, even in a conservative industry like steel, some people are open to new ways of thinking and to using new tools and new ways to work.

I would be really interested to hear from anyone else who has tried a similar experiment.  How did you get on?