Trust Economy: How to build a ready market for your product and services.
The way the world is moving is toward an economy where people need intelligence, trusted advice to make decision. As you know, people have less time and high demand is on the little they have. To make your company, product and service stand out in this trust economy, you must build relationship. The key here is relationship. As many people you have trusted relationship with, the better your chance of success.
New Definition of ROI
You need to know that the definition for ROI as you were taught in the class has changed. It used to be “Return on Investment” now it means “Return on Influence”. The larger your influence the better for your business and personality.
Trust Economy; The people, the currency
Human-over-Ip is the protocol for the trust economy. Am sure we all are familiar with the general HTTP protocol. Yeah! That is the protocol of the internet, but it’s high timed we recognize that, friendship, Social, business and every other activities we engage in real life has move over the internet, so the protocol as change. In our normal economy, we have law-backed-paper as money. This age things have change, like I said earlier, people do not have much time, they have target to meet and places to go. So for you to be able to get their attention you must have value that is much more than their targets. So, attention in this current age is the current for the Trust Economy.
For people to stop by and read your blog, to buy your product, come to your company, they must sense some value and sensing value is influenced by various things in this age. The most important of all are the people they trust, people they know and people who are in-touch with them.
The Magic Wand: Getting your client/customer when you need them
It’s old-fashioned to rush-to-market your product and service to people. They are concerned about thier time and hard-earned money. They don’t want to take another time to test your product. They want a product they know or someone they trust advise them to go for. You know, Celebrities and big figures around are used to advertise product, well the celebrity is being paid for the service and might not have tested the product. So the trust is not there. People have tried over and over again and they are just tired of it. They buy product recommended by their friend than any other solid, classic advert. As you know, their friend is not being paid for the advice and the friend is talking from experience.
For you to effectively get your client when you need them, you need to have built relationship over time. They want to know you as human, they want to be sure that you have feelings; they want to know how much you care. So, when you meet the next person in the seminar, get interested in things they like most and discuss with them. Let them have a feel of your human-hood.
Do you have an experience of how difficult to achieve this? Let’s discuss.
You can download Trust Economy here written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
How To Be Known In a Crowded Web Space
I will be discussing about web strategies you can employ right away to carve a niche for yourself on the internet. This principle can also be used to promote anything, including you company.
Currently the internet has more than 1.5 billion people who surfs it daily (source), so many people and company are using the internet to improve their brand and create awareness about themselves. In a crowded web, it’s important that you take cognizance steps to let yourself be known to the world.
Currently the most used website for search online is Google; more than 135 million people from the US alone use it daily (source). And vast a lot of people use it around the world. Google has been a de facto on the web. Whatever it sees is what people believe. So how do you control these results?
How does it work?
Ordinarily Google scans web pages submitted to it, and then follows every other links on the website. This links could be within the website or link to another site. It ranks the web pages in order of their importance, that is; the more links about a subject generated in the process of linking the higher the rank.
Web pages are standardized. Want to ways to make this site Google-friendly, this are more technical, if you are a web designer/developer go read this article (How search engine works). Since this article is primarily for people who are not technical people but are willing to make their online presence be known. More so, the tools I will discuss here has been optimized with these features.
How to get start
The way people communicate online has changed, and tools evolved over time. Now you can post article on a web page and have it displayed immediately, but in the early ‘90s it was such a big task to accomplish. Some of these are the phenomenal around; basically social networking/media technologies. All these are generally called New Media! It has transformed the way we make new friend, find new friends, get jobs, build career and share information rapidly.
Below are the recommended tools you can use to increase your online presence.
- · Personal Website: First on my list is your personal website (i.e yourname.com). On this website, you should describe yourself, what you do and whatever you want people to know about you. It is a very strategic way to promote yourself and services. By having a personal/business site, you sure have shown that you are serious about your person and business. It is like your name. If I meet you for the first time and ask you to tell me about yourself; you tell me your name before saying where you are from and what you do. So, having your personal website is like giving yourself a name. In this case on world registry book, the Internet! When people Google you, the first on the result list is your personal website, provided you registered it in your name.
- · LinkedIn.com: Do you want to build a business or career, want to promote yourself, want to connect with real and serious? Join this website. It has over 30 million users to its credit, that means your network can grow endlessly. Also, the search result for Linkedin on Google appears faster than other social networking site. It allows you to add, what I will call your resume in a structure manner. The way you structure this content will now depends on how much network you can build.
- · Facebook.com: currently the most active social networking websites, it is in the top 5 most traffic website in the world and has over 140 million active users on its network. It has ready tones of people for you to connect with. You can also join professional groups on this site too.
Make as many friends as possible, you don’t know when their link will be important to you. - · Myspace.com: though ranked after facebook. It’s also a good place for you to show what you have to the world. This is specifically good for celebs entertainer (my own opinion)
- · Digg.com: Want to share some links or dig up other links? Digg is a perfect place for you to do that. When people view your post and they find it useful, they will vote you up pretty faster.
- · Delicious: Sometimes when you are surfing the web, you go to many site, you may want to keep those links for later times or share with your friends.
Summary
To better show up in this web-party, follow the steps outline above and you will see yourself taking charge of what people know, or search for about you on the internet. The steps outlined above will let your result show up on the first page of Google search result. The earlier, the better.
I will share with you in my next article on how to sync these for effective management.
Am sure you have also learnt or have read about how to be known online and building personal brand, do share with us in the comment below.
