I had occasion the past two days to reach out to my network to get quick answers to some questions. The process was so effective I thought it would be good to share, as it illustrates the power of your network.
I used two networks this week for my questions, one, LinkedIn, the other, Twitter. I have 500+ in my network on LinkedIn and another 1000+ on Twitter (yeah I know, I'm a slacker). So, it seemed like someone ought to have the answers. What was interesting was that my questions were extremely different from one another, so I need to reach a diverse set of people.
The first question: "What have you seen as an effective way to market Webinars? (Then I gave a list of what I am already doing). I posted this on LinkedIn Answers (go here to see). Once you have posted your question (note: I think it is odd that it's called Answers, when what you post are Questions), you then select people in your network to be notified that you have posted a question.
So, in this case, I looked at all of my contacts in Marketing, selected their names and sent the question along. It was also cross-posted on the main Answers site and within 30 minutes I was getting some really good feedback. Best answer and one that I implemented immediately was Tell A Friend. I added a button on our Webinar website and will be monitoring it to see how well that goes.
When someone answers your question, you get an email, so you don't have to keep checking LinkedIn, and you can reply directly to the person (etiquette suggests that you at least say thanks). Once you have the question answered, you can close the question, it auto-closes after a week I believe.
My second question was, "I am building a map of all of the Marketing Communication companies in the known universe - I know there are more than 2500 subsidiaries to the 8 big holding companies, does anyone have a map, graphic, listing or pointer to help me in this project?"
I received my first answer (and the best one) within 1 minute after posting - seriously, one minute. Within an hour I had several more pointers to roughly the same information. Seems that AdAge is famous for producing a map of the big companies once a year and it just came out last month, so was fresh in everyone's mind.
Again, the network came to my aid better than Google did, as I tried and tried and couldn't get my search terminology correct and was wasting valuable time.
I thanked all of my (new) helpful friends and it was even suggested that the Map I am creating become some sort of Creative Commons shared resource, as there really isn't anything out there with the completeness I needed for this project.
Finally I had a question today about managing my TODO list and I turned to Twitter as an experiment. I posted this:
@marksylvester Struggling with massive TODO list - tried tons of tools, none really worked. What's working for you? Stickies are threatening to bury me
Within 5 minutes I was sent plenty of suggestions of ways to deal with my list, and pleas from other followers to share the answers. It was interesting also to see that people who follow me on Facebook also posted replies (comments), as my Tweets are cross-posted to my FB account.
So, what's this all mean? Your network is a great place for informal learning and in that learning an ancillary benefit is that you get to meet new people and grow your network even larger.
I gave back to the community this afternoon by posting a fix I found to a troubling problem with Snow Leopard on my Mac and my HP Scanner - seems that tons of people have this problem and all of the fixes were tragically difficult, I was able to find something simple, sweet and tweetable.
What goes around comes around.
How are you using your network to learn - what are you teaching your network?
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