Leveraging the Power of Social Networks for Fame & Fortune

spaceballs
Originally uploaded by revraikes.

As you may have seen from my 2 previous posts:

• Post 1
• Post 2

I used my moribund blog (really I hadn't posted with any regularity for a year or so), Twitter & Facebook to goad ThinkGeek.com into taking a second look at a customer service issue that my girlfriend had raised with them.

Now, this was not the expected result. I pop-off about a lot of stuff and it doesn't seem to get any attention. That's one of the reasons that I stopped blogging. I fully expected to rant in the darkness and walk-away feeling disenfranchised as ever.

However, I have been working on increasing my visibility on the web for the last couple of years. That's the thing - nobody will look at your stuff if they don't know it's there.

One caveat before I go on, though. This post is not intended to be a guide in how to blackmail businesses 140 characters at a time. It's about new ways of doing business and the opening of communication channels between customer and company.

You see, ThinkGeek very wisely has someone monitoring mentions of their brand on Twitter. I hadn't used their profile name to mention them, but they saw my post. Heck, the company may be small enough that that someone is the boss there. The point is that they got back to me quickly, got in contact with my girlfriend (or vice-versa) through the comments section on my blog and resolved the issue within a week.

All the while, I was using this URL shortening service called Tr.im to monitor how many people were looking at the links I was laying down in Twitter & Facebook (by the way, I have to note again that it took a long time to develop my networks). It wasn't a lot. I'm not that popular even though I'm ubiquitous and have been trying relatively hard to get my name out there to make connections and maybe even get work. But it was widespread, from the US to the UK to Korea even.

This is going long, so: to be cont'd=>