How To Win Friends & Influence People Online in 3 Free and Easy Steps

Social Sales on Mad MenI don’t care what business you’re in, if you’re in business, you’re in the business of making friends. Always have been. Always will be.

When the Mad Men of Madison Avenue roamed free, business was done among friends over 3 martini lunches and damn dear a full pack of Lucky Strikes.

Today, business is more likely to be twittered, liked and endorsed on the interwebs. That’s where your friends are and you’re in the business of making friends.

Here’s 3 free tools that can help you make more friends, connect with potential customers, deepen and strengthen your business realtionships across mulitple social touch points including phone, email, LinkedIn. twitter, Facebook, Google+ and more all from one screen on your browser.

You can build and monitor your social media presence, productivity and personality fast.

And just as importantly save time so that you can get some actual work done.

Rapportive:

Rappaportive is magic.

If this were 15th century New England, they’d burn Rapportive at the stake and she’d deserve it.

Rappaortive is a browser app that turns your humble gmail account into a full fledged social media enabled CRM cockpit. It takes Dale Carnegie’s concepts of Winning Friends and Influencing People online and on demand.

Imagine getting an email from potential customer and a window opens beside the email with the person’s picture, job title and links to their Facebook, Twitter Google+ and LinkedIn profiles. A few clicks later you and that potential customer are connected. Friends.

Then, over time, you’ll do what friends do. You’ll share pictures of your kids, of your hobbies of your favorite teams. You’ll talk about the big game and wish each other happy birthday. You’ll express sympathy when they’re sick and condolences when loved ones pass. That’s what friends do.
Facebook birthday greetings
It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s not going to happen with every single contact you invite into your network, but it happens. And when it comes time to do business again, it turns cold calls into warm calls.

Friends take calls from their friends.

Hootsuite

Of course, once you’re connected, you have to find something to talk about. Something to keep all your new found friends engaged. Between Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and all the others, just staying connected across every platform is damn near a full days work. and that’s without creating and disseminating a steady stream of content to feed the machine.

Hootsuite is a Social Media Mamager that lets you monitor your social media presence and schedule your postings in advance and around the clock while optimizing the timing of your tweets, updates and shares for maximum reach and impact.

On it’s own Hootsute offers amazing leverage and time savings but the real mojo is Hootsuite’s browser app Hootlet.

Hootlet

Say you’re cruising the web, reading the articles, not looking at the pictures, and you run across a great piece about ice fishing with the Inuit in the Northwest Territories that you have to share with your eager facebook posse, you just click on an icon in your browser bar and HOOOOO!!! Up pops the Hootlet!

Hootlet gives you a short-link to the article along with a pre-formatted post that you can add to, edit or flavor to taste with your own secret sauce and then distribute across the social media accounts of your choosing at the absolute optimum time for maximum impact.

And if your hot new discovery of the Henry Ford quote about his customers probably wanting faster horses just can’t wait, you simply cut and paste into the Hootlet and post it everywhere on every account at the same damn time, on demand, right frickin’ now!

It’s like the Emergency Broadcast System of your own little world. In the event of an actual grumpy cat, you would have been instructed to proceed to your safe area.

The internet, email and social media have revolutionized the way business is conducted. These tools leverage your communications and give you an opportunity to reach many, many times more potential customers than was even imaginable just a few years ago.

But the dynamics of forming a human bond haven’t changed.

My first job out of college was selling radio ads in Mississippi and my first Sales Manager was a man named Russ Wilson. Russ was a big proponent of community service. He was in the Kiwanis and The Rotary and The Lions Club. That’s where his friends were and that’s where he did business.

He taught me that you have to connect, you have to put yourself out there, you have to engage and you have to make friends, but you have to be doing it for the right reasons.

You have to be of service and you have to be of value because if you’re just looking to make a sale, then you’re not looking for a friend, you’re looking for a customer. And people know the difference.

Whether it’s over bad chicken at the Civitan Luncheon Club or in your twitter stream.

People know the difference.