Tips for Better Online Partnerships

Everyone reading this post is doing business with someone. Chances are, you may even have an online relationship with that person and/or their company. When we’re in charge of running businesses that operate in a time where cyberculture will only become more important, how can we work to use the “cyber” part to our advantage?

I have yet to run into a business situation where partnerships aren’t important. They might come in the form of referrals, vendors, strategic partners, fellow professional association members – just to name a few. Let’s have a look at one simple way we can use social tools to our advantage to build even stronger relationships with the people and companies who let us get business done each day.

Taking “Selfish” Out of Our Vocabularies

When we spend time online, it’s generally for ourselves. Even in social outlets like Facebook and Twitter – we’re there to talk to our friends, our colleagues, and other people that we already know. What we’re forgetting, however, is that those are pretty selfish activities. If we shifted our school of thought to one that looks at our online social interactions as being altruistic versus selfish, there’s the potential to have an entirely new world of allies, contact, and potential clients come into view. Some tips we’ve found useful to make our online social presences less about us and more about the people who help us get business done (and many of whom ARE our business):

• Sharing: We find interesting articles all the time, so we share those. But what about the articles that our partners find interesting? We take the time to not just re-share those (through retweets or Facebook posts), but read them so that we can keep educating ourselves about our colleagues and partners.
• Setting Up Alerts: We’re old school and use Google Alerts to keep tabs on our customers and strategic partners. When we see a press release of news about that company come across, we’re in there reading, staying up-to-date, and sharing with our audience. The more people who know about the people with whom we do business, the more people who will eventually know about our relationship with them. And honestly, our customers are appreciative that we support their news and milestones, too.
• Having Conversations: We like Twitter very much for this. Not only is it easy to accomplish the above two bulletpoints using this short-form medium, but it allows us to have more conversations with the people who matter most to our services industries and business. And no – not everything is on-topic. We all like coffee and hate traffic. Talking about life’s nuances builds relationships on an ever deeper level than incessant all-business talks. (yawn)

We even wrote about one of our strategic partners in our blog earlier this week. It’s easier than you might think to take selfish out of your online activities and make them more customer-centric. And no – that doesn’t mean you have to turn off your own agenda. It’s just a volume knob that we could all do better at turning down on occasion.

Posted by: John Cushman on January 19th, 2012 // View Comments
Posted in: News
Tags: Business, Business Productivity, Business Tips, Partnerships
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