Who do you trust?

We were intrigued by a report on the Discover Small Business Watch by the Center for Media Research that discussed the economic confidence among 1,000 small businesses with five or fewer employees. Most of the article discusses economic confidence and cash flow. But we perked up towards the end...

"The buzz that general-interest networking sites are generating hasn't struck a chord with the Main Street small business crowd... " Rachakonda said. 55 percent of respondents said they would not consider using a service or small business that they heard about on a social or business networking Web site.

The study found that younger business owners use online networking the most. In the 18-29 age group, membership at general online networking sites reached as high as 41 percent at some of the more popular online networking communities. Membership among older age groups at the same sites is still significantly lower.

So we've crafted this poll.

Where do you wind up on the issue of utilizing social networking for business? Who do you trust?

Comments

[Bill Snyder]

Pretty interesting. I've been more of the service provider than the service recipient. The first gig I got off a professional networking site was back in 1998, when Amazon.com needed content for it's soon-to-launch music store.

I think the question might be misleading to people who are not active social media users. "55 percent of respondents said they would not consider using a service or small business that they heard about on a social or business networking Web site."

If you are not familiar with social networking, you'd assume you may assume that people go online, make contacts, and jump into deals. Quite the contrary, at least in my experience, it's been about building relationship first and then getting into deals. Perhaps you make a friend and six months later you need a vendor in a field that friend uses. The friend offers advice and gains nothing, financially at least, from the deal. Five years ago, or so, I answered a personal ad. Didn't get romantically involved, but we became friends. A couple of years after that, her company needed someone with experience in functional copy. Well, that was two years from social networking to actually working together, and work wasn't the intent of answering the personal ad. I suspect, that if spelled out more specifically, you might get different answers. For example, "You have a colleague with a blog. You need service X, and you saw your colleague raving about just a service provider on their blog. Would you consider contacting the vendor to discuss their services?"