Serendipity the key to social marketing strategy

 



Ecademy founder Penny Power says you should never underestimate the power of the happy accident on her latest business advice show:

If you're a business person, you like to be methodical, and you like to wake up in the morning and have tasks that you're going to tick off. And you're very controlled and process oriented, because you've lived a life of being very organized. And I've done that. And I've done that, because it's going to help me achieve x and y.

The world's very different to that. It's very random. Information flows at you. And the temptation is just to keep deleting and ignoring that's important to your business and stop you from being focused. And all the time, I have people saying this one of the biggest huddled they have to overcome when they start going into the social networking world, where information is random. And how do they filter?

Well, whether you filter or not is probably the biggest decision you have to make. Because you have to consider if you're part of a community, are you just using that community for what you want, like a utility? Or actually having a sense of belonging to that community. So a sense of belonging means almost treating it like a family. And your family, you have lots of conversations. Your friends, you have lots of conversations. Very random. And then occasionally, you'll get those serendipitous moments where somebody will say, "I've got just the answer for you." Or "I know just the person you need to know." And if you treat your business like you always, if you treat it like that in social networks, in a controlled way, you miss a lot of stuff on the left field; that all the opportunities that people might bring to you, because they just see you as being a user and a taker rather than somebody who is actually belonging to the community.