I was talking to Charlotte Greenman yesterday following a conversation started at the Startups Live Brisol event a while back. As a a tele-marketeer, Charlotte was chasing me as I’d said to get back towards November (and obviously hadn’t, oops). Even though I’m not sure that my business is quite ready for the B2B services that Charlotte offers, we had a chat about some of the people I am working with and there may be mutual referrals that are relevant.
Charlotte also mentioned a qualified referral service / business that she’s building. I guess a bit like LinkedIn but more selective and related to those closer businesses that she’s either worked with or had a personal reference for. I have to admit to being a bit of a social network junkie, apart from MySpace (where I couldn’t get past the flurecent green & pink home pages everyone seemed to use) I try and build as wide and diverse networks as I can on LinkedIn, FaceBook, Plaxo. I’ve also used MyBlogLog, and increasingly Twitter as a source of network updating and information.
There’s been a ton of stuff written about social networks, the value of trust and how the on line social networks aren’t always that valuable in marketing terms. The most recent storm in the blogosphere being around the new Facebook SocialAd, probably the best analysis is by Jeremiah Owyang, with additional insight from Charlene Li. I don’t think any of the on line solutions have completely cracked it, but in an increasingly fast paced world, they are useful for not having to remember everything about everyone you ever met. Which is pretty cool.
The Startups Live evening was really good, the highlight of which was a tour de force from Tim Smit (Eden Project). He took us all on a ‘Cresta Run of philosophy, business and social enterprise thinking’ roughly his words. There was too much, too fast to make sensible notes and Tim was very clear that these were just things that worked for him. I guess the 4 things I took away (at last the four things I noted down) were;
- Future Truths – put yourself in a position where failure is jut too scary, it’s amazing what you’ll accomplish (trying that out with a couple ideas at the moment)
- Live with risk (OK kind of goes with the future truth stuff)
- Trust to Intuition – this one’s more difficult, I probably do try and over analyse, probably some latent engineer thing
- Concentrate on the 10% chance of success not the 90% chance of failure
All in all a great evening, I met some really interesting folks. Hopefully some will be featured as future conversations.