A long time ago not too far away, everything had a price tag because there were not much options available. If something was given away for free, it was more of a privilege than the norm. “Buy One Get One Free” and other big sales promotions were never much of a big deal as life was good, simple and easy.

Today, when something free is offered, everyone goes out of their way to get into the action. A “Big Sale” event is enough reason to change one’s daily routine or make a snap decision to drop everything and tell your spouse, “let’s go – now!” That’s exactly what happened when I spent the day at the Bonifacio High Street commercial area inside The Fort after attending a BCBP fellowship breakfast. My good friend and I hopped from one retail outlet to another window shopping and ended up at Starbucks for more banter before calling it a night. When we left the café at around 7:30 PM, we were surprised to see hundreds of people loitering around the two-block area. I realized they were all waiting for a free view of the scheduled Pyro Olympics. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t know that that Saturday’s show has already been rescheduled and moved to January 2010 because of the previous Saturday’s fireworks competition between China and Germany turning out to be a rainy night and thus spoiled the show.

Starbucks inside Fully Booked at the Bonifacio High Street, The Fort

I’m an ardent fan of anything free. In fact, my moniker for this is “free, fast and forever” – the three F’s of things that are must haves for anything that being offered for free. When “free” fails the two remaining F’s, it’s not enticing to continue the service.

However, some things will never come for free. There was a long go internet site that offered free phone calls to any US number (I couldn’t put my finger in it but it started with the letter “S”) but eventually stopped giving its service for free because (probably) of the cost of providing it for free was just too much. So, in the spirit of “free,” I’ve compiled a short list of things I use for my business matters that’s “free, fast and (hopefully) forever.”

Skype – still the best free PC-to-PC voice service

Skype is still the best-in-quality, VOIP-based, chat-and-talk, web-based solution

Skype is the best peer-to-peer voice platform using the internet that’s been around for free and has maintained the quality of service I expect a voice provider to do. Yahoo Messenger et al also provides the same service but their voice quality isn’t as good as Skype. Though I chat with friends, I try not to do this with my North American clients. In fact, many of the latter don’t even maintain a chat account because they’d rather speak than type. I would e-mail clients asking for a good date and time to speak to each other using Skype because in my experience, business transactions are done better by talking to each other. Through the e-mail message, I ask my prospective client if he has a Skype account and schedule a date and time to discuss doing business with each other. One thing I will never do is discusss a business opportunity using e-mail, which many Asians like Filipinos try to do. North Americans and Europeans actually prefer talking than writing. Filipinos love doing the reverse; why do you think text messaging is a huge success in the country?

The Inexpensive Philippine Long Distance Telephone Solutions

Globe TipIDD prepaid card allows you to call North America for 2.50 Pesos per minute

If your client does not have a Skype account, immediately offer to call him instead – don’t even think about asking him to create a Skype account. Please. Also, this is a business opportunity for you so don’t make the mistake of assuming he will call you in the Philippines. In today’s telecommunications world, it’s actually cheaper to call North America from the Philippines than the reverse. There are inexpensive ways I call my North American clients. I can buy a Globe TipIDD card for my Globe landline which gives me 40 minutes of talk time to the US or Canada for 100 Pesos, or the PLDT Budget Card that gives me 30 minutes for 100 Pesos or 60 minutes for 200 Pesos. If I’m not around a landline, I can use my Globe mobile phone and dial 12800, the country code, area code and telephone number, and get charged about 7 to 10 Pesos per minute, half of the regular 20 Pesos per minute cost. You can also buy the popular Magic Jack product that allows you unlimited calls in the US which retails for about 4,000 Pesos. However, before you complain how lousy the service is, remember that the weakest link to an internet-based telephone system is your internet bandwidth. Using a poor DSL connection will definitely make the quality of service bad. In technical terms, traditional VOIP-based services require 64 kbps of simultaneous upload and download speed. DSL connections don’t have any bandwidth commitment so even if you have a 2 Mbps DSL connection, it can drop to zero in a second or two, then climb up back to its subscribed speed, drop down and up again. That’s why call centers in the Philippines pay thousands of Dollars to subscribe to internet lines that maintain the required simultaneous upload-download speeds.

You can buy prepaid minutes from Global Access anytime.

You can also buy prepaid minutes from a service provider they call a “termination service provider,” one who sets up VOIP lines and terminates your VOIP call to a North American telephone number. If you prepay and buy around 2,000 minutes at a high price of $0.03 per minute, that’s about 2,760 Pesos worth but valued only at about 1.38 Pesos per minute, still lower than the prepaid card landline providers Globe and PLDT. All you need is to download a freeware called “X-Lite”, configure the user ID, password and domain IP address and you’re set to call North America at cheap rates. I’ve used www.globalaccesscomm.com before for this kind of service. I bought 20,000 minutes worth at $0.015 per minute rate. They are located at the 21st floor of Prestige Building along F.Ortigas Jr. Ave. (formerly Emerald Ave.) where you can pay by check or Peso or Dollar cash in person.

Get a Corporate E-mail Address for $10 a year

In today’s wired world, many in business continue to use free e-mail services like Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail and the like. That’s great for personal e-mails and the like. However, you must professionalize your corporate image by using an e-mail address that depicts your business, e.g. myname@company.com You normally have to buy an e-mail hosting solution that will cost about $50 to $100 a year. I did it the cheaper way but let me explain below.

GoDaddy.com is a popular domain and hosting provider with good phone support, even from the Philippines

First, I bought a domain name from GoDaddy.com for about $10 a year – it’s cheaper if you purchase the two or three year subscription. I know of only two very popular free e-mail hosting sites that offer hosting your organization’s domain for free – that’s Hotmail/Live.com and Gmail.com. I’m sure there are hundreds of others out there but I stuck it out with an e-mail hosting site that I’m already used to the graphical user interface (“GUI”). You can use Google Apps Standard Edition (go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html) to set up your corporate e-mail account for free, including Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Site. I can’t find the link to Live.com’s version but I’m sure the free e-mail hosting feature is still there. If you’d like to use other free e-mail hosting service, that’s okay, too. Whichever you use, your e-mail hosting provider should give you easy-to-understand instructions to point your domain’s e-mail IP address to the new email hosting platform you’re going to use. If what you’re reading still sounds too Greek, copy or print all the instructions of your free e-mail hosting provider and call GoDaddy.com. in about 10 minutes, they’ll have your domain settings changed and pointed to your free e-mail hosting provider for you. C’mon! 10 minutes of a long-distance telephone call to a US number is peanuts compared to the anxiety of having a domain name you can’t even use. Trust me when I say e-mail will not work right away – the tendency is to keep bouncing e-mails between your domain provider and yourself until the former clearly understands what it is you’re in need of help for.

Blogging as a Corporate Website

Wordpress offers everything FREE - free blog hosting or download their entire blogging program for free

Today’s corporate websites now copy the format or actually use free blog sites like Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress. I’m a WordPress user but other blogging sites are just as easy to use. However, WordPress.com also offers their entire blogging software free to download at WordPress.org. This entire software is something you can use and alter when you have your own web hosting space. But start with the free blog hosting site like WordPress.com before attempting to buy a hosting package and use the WordPress.org program. I bought a personal domain name in April and pointed it to my WordPress.com site, i.e. www.company.com points to company.wordpress.com. After six months of using the free WordPress.com blog space and getting a good feel about WordPress and the activity of blogging, it was time for me to buy a hosting package. Before I did, I looked for a free but better looking WordPress theme (like the themes of your mobile phone) that would now professionalize (or personalize) the look and feel of my original blog. I bought a $50 per year hosting package from GoDaddy.com that’s WordPress-ready. When I found the free WordPress theme that I liked, I downloaded it into my new WordPress hosting package.

Blogging is now the new method of providing content to web visitors besides media publication or communications companies. Even CNN uses the free WordPress.org program in their website. Now that people are so used to reading blogs, the old-world way of creating a catalog-looking website is passé. Your corporate site now needs to be updated, at least, on a weekly basis; otherwise, people will visit you twice and never return because nothing changed in your site or nothing interesting exists. Content is now king – either you develop your own content or hire the services of other people to develop content for you. You can become an employer at oDesk.com to have freelance content writers bid for your project or get your relative, friend or acquaintance to help – besides hiring someone the traditional way.

Conference Calling the United States for Free

Freeconference.com is by far an established multi-party telephone conference solution that FREE to use.

When I need a three-party conference call that involves a North American entity, I always use www.freeconference.com to set up the bridge conference telephone number. This simply means everyone must call a US telephone number, enter the PIN code and start talking to each other. If it involves a Philippine company calling the US number, I always give my two-cents of suggestions on the inexpensive ways to call the US as I described above. Freeconference.com allows you to set up as many participants as you want and up to four hours of talk time without paying a single cent. It also allows you to auto-email all the participants with an attached Outlook-formatted calendar file. Recording the conference used to be free but is now a paid service. However, I don’t usually need to record conference calls as all of my telephone meetings are exploratory and discussion-based – writing out my notes using pen and paper has always been easier than being lazy and just recording the conversation. After the telephone meeting, I always create and e-mail everyone an after-conference report to document everything and allow the other participants to review and even add their comments or things that I missed jotting down. I’ve been using Freeconference.com since 2005.

Here’s a realization: most countries’ long-distance calling rates to the United States is cheaper than two Third World countries calling each other. So, if I have that situation, it actually becomes more cost-effective to call a U.S. bridge conferencing telephone number, like Freeconference.com, than calling each other long distance. For example, I’m currently dealing with a call center in Guyana. Initially, I started a Freeconference.com US-based telephone number until we became more familiar with each other and relied on Skype in our following conversations.

Online Address Books with Birthday Reminders

Plaxo.com has been around for a long time. I use it for being reminded of birthdays and sending Plaxo e-Cards to e-mail addresses.

For address books, I used to use Plaxo.com because it provided free use of its “export to file” feature; today, you have to pay for that. However, I still rely on it to remind me of birthdays and so I continue to update it every time I receive a new business card. It automatically invites my new contact to check and revise my entries even without forcing my new contact to join Plaxo. This is good because some systems force you to join their online service before allowing you to update or change detailed information. One field that’s always there is the birthday field. Birthdays are important for me in business because it is the most important event for a person without having to know his nationality or religion. Remembering someone’s birthday is a great relationship-building activity you can do to someone who many not give you business today but may do so in an unforeseen future. A great example is an e-mail acquaintance of mine from Toronto (I’ll call him Martin). We met in a Yahoo Group because we both worked for the call center industry in 2002. I kept tabs with him every year when I greeted him on his birthday and we’d continue to exchange a few more e-mails right after greeting him until the conversation dies down and I greet him the following year. Four years later, when I greeted him on his birthday, I also told him I was setting up a call center and wondered if he could help point me to a good campaign. Lo and behold he pointed me to his good friend (who I’ll call Cathy) who worked for the largest trade publication company in the world. Because Martin was a good friend of Cathy, she obliged to conference call with me. In the end, I won the hearts of Cathy and her team to be one of the outsourced call centers for their business.

Hotspots as My Office

Coffee Bean reestablished itself as a telecommuting-friendly cafe with FREE wi-fi. But it still lacks the electrical outlets power-users look for.

For some years, I’ve been a street-side businessman, always out meeting with people, marketing and selling myself and my products or services outside the workplace. Because I’m very much involved in internet-based networking, correspondences and communications, I rely on hotspots to do my business. Though there were enticing options to get a serviced office workstation or e-office, I declined knowing I would probably spend only an hour in the office and get out doing my work in coffee shops that have wi-fi access. Today, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf offers the best and notebook-friendly free wi-fi hotspot in Manila. I bought a “Swirl Card” that gives me rewards points plus the WEP key or password to access their wi-fi system. A funny story about Coffee Bean’s internet is a recent experience with a prospective client. As a Country Representative of Kunnect.com, I conduct on-the-spot demo of the Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) besides my traditional presentation. Once, I did this at New World Renaissance Hotel. It had terrible internet with lots of timeouts. When I told the prospect if he wouldn’t mind walking to the Coffee Bean branch at Greenbelt 3, he was surprised how fast the internet was at the cafe compared with the hotel. The most quiet branch of Coffee Bean I’ve been to is at the ground floor of the Greenbelt Residences condominium, right across Greenbelt 2. It’s a lot smaller than that of Greenbelt 3 or Robinson’s Galleria mall. By the way, all Coffee Bean branches are hotspots.

A quiet, telecommuter-friendly, FREE wi-fi cafe.

Besides Coffee Bean, I also choose Blenz, the Canadian coffee shop that only has two branches: at Solaris One Building along dela Rosa street in Makati City and another one at SM Megamall. It’s got a good ambience, quiet, not much people so it isn’t noisy and lots of electrical outlets in case your laptop runs out of battery power. However, Blenz is not that easy to find as the shop isn’t a street-view cafe and not everyone knows where Solaris One building is. It’s got free wi-fi with any amount of purchase.

Other hotspots I go to conduct meetings are Chili’s in Greenbelt 5, Bubba Gump at Greenbelt 3 (they have an airconditioned smoking area, just like Coffee Bean at the Robinson’s Galleria mall) and TGI Fridays at Glorietta 3. Now, here’s a tip: Globe DSL has been installing their wi-fi routers to new subscribers, including businesses such as restaurants. The funny thing they do is that the default WEP key or password is “aabbccddee” using the SSID “aztech”. So, if you’re in an area where you see the same SSID or even “linksys”, try to see if they have the same password. Chili’s obviously uses Globe because when I asked for the WEP key, the server replied “aabbccddee”.

I use Globe Visibility because I'm usually at an Ayala-owned place.

However, when I’m stuck in a place without free wi-fi, I always have my Globe Visibility USB-based internet dongle (this is the predecessor of the Globe Tattoo). Why did I choose Globe? Well, I usually conduct my meetings in Ayala malls and Globe is an Ayala company; so, naturally, Globe’s signal would be far better in Ayala malls than competing products like SmartBro and Sun cellular. If you’re the type who always goes to the province, I think SmartBro would be better because Smart’s provincial coverage is better than Globe. For someone who’s always in a Robinsons mall, go for the Sun Cellular version. For a prepaid internet dongle, it costs about 20 Pesos per hour for internet access that can ideally reach 3 Mbps but about a maximum of 2 Mbps for HSDPA access in a 3G environment.

In Summary

I’m sure there are many other things that you do that would benefit you if some provider offered it for free or at a very reduced price, like text messaging (I used Globe’s Immortal Text; for 10 Pesos, I get 50 free text messages to other Globe or Touch Mobile subscribers plus 10 free text messages to people using other networks without an expiration date). But for this literary piece, I’ll stick to these basic items I mentioned that continues to be my source of free or inexpensive ways of doing business in our very competitive world. I do hope some of these tips and experiences can help you with your work as it has done with me. If you’re using a whole lot more that can help the readers, please share us your tips on “free, fast and forever.”

Many people say that online social networking sites like Facebook are not for them. From the many similar remarks I’ve heard, either they’re happy with their current networking site or they think they’re too old or busy to enter social networks. On the latter response, I remember a TV episode of “NUMB3RS” where the dad of Charles Eppes asked his son for his help in creating a profile in Facebook. He realized some of his (old) friends were in Facebook and wanted to join in. The following day, he was having coffee with a long, lost buddy.

But long before I discovered online social networks, I started my web-based networking with a bunch of high school batchmates using e-Groups. In its heyday, Yahoo bought the company and incorporated it into the Yahoo portal as Yahoo Groups, which continues to exist until today. Since its inception, I’ve joined about 50 online groups and also created 8 groups with 5 still very active until now. Then and until now, this was one of the best online social networking using the web as the medium to create conversations (more about “conversations” below). In those days, every article I read said that about 90% of the people who go online use it for reading and writing e-mails (and 10% also surf the net.) Up to now, many have still maintained the group conversations in Yahoo Groups because some who use the internet in the workplace cannot access the popular online social networking sites. Many corporate servers block these sites.

I remember joining Ryze, one of the first online business networking sites before creating a Friendster account in 2002. By 2006, I joined Facebook at the behest of my daughter because I wouldn’t create an account in MySpace which was the first online social network site she joined at age 11. I was also a Plaxo member long before it reinvented itself to a social-cum-business networking site using the brand name “Pulse“. I loved Plaxo because it incorporated an e-Card system, allowing me to be reminded of birthdays and use Plaxo to send them online birthday cards. (Part of my personal motto was “B.M.W.” which means “Birthdays, Marriages and Wakes.” These are the three important dates in a person’s life. When you remember these or are even physically present, that person will usually make you a friend for life.) With much convenience, Plaxo also sent e-mail messages to people I added in my address book to confirm their contact information and which also invited everyone to join Plaxo, which many did. The last good thing about Plaxo was when my Microsoft Outlook crashed, wiping out all my contact data. Through Plaxo, I was able to recover all of them. Then, the last online networking site I registered with was Linked In. In all, I’ve been maintaining only three online social networks — Friendster, Facebook and Linked In. Let me tell you why…

Friendster – www.Friendster.com.

Friendster.com

From the many articles I’ve read about Friendster, they’ve become very popular in Asia, particularly the Philippines and Filipinos around the world. When I was working for a call center in South America, I created one under the name “Ralph Pearson” thinking that I would be using it to network with the U.S. (because it was created in Mountain View, CA and its inital market was North America). Eventually, I shifted to my own name and have been using it since.

I started using Friendster as a networking tool with many of my friends and acquaintances. However, if I were to use this for business networking, I needed to create a profile that depicted who I really was. I also made sure that pictures also depicted my family (to show a semblance of family and balance in life) and some corporate event (lunch meetings or so). My written profile also had to be complete. The important thing was adding stuff in the interests and hobbies portion — you’ve got to be consistent to what you write and who you really are when they do meet me. If you golf, make sure it’s true. If you love New Wave as a genre of music, you’ve got to be prepared to have a conversation solely on that topic. So, make sure your profile is as honest as possible, not just “make believe.”

Going to the Philippines (from Canada) to start my entrepreneurial stint in the call center industry, I was able to recruit hundreds of prospective call center representatives or agents using Friendster. I would search using company names I knew that employed the same profile of agents as I was seeking or using keywords associated to the industry or interests that was common to my search. Mind you, Friendster only allows 50 messages per 24-hour day. So, I would continue recruiting in Friendster everyday for about 3 to 4 weeks and get to hire 20 or so agents. One thing you should be careful is what you type in the text of your private message. Knowing that I was recruiting, I made sure I mentioned details of the compensation and benefits package, company name, location of the call center, if it was a start-up, a sentence about the vision-mission phrase (not statement) and a complete cadre of contact information that allows them to call or personally visit the center. The shorter but very detailed and straight to the point your message is, the better it is.

I would guess about 70% of those who I sent Friendster private messages replied back, even negatively but thanked me nonetheless for inviting them. Like I expected, many referred back to my profile page (which was not set in Private mode and thus allowed anybody to look at it and message me), checking out to see if I was legitimate and, most importantly, if I were the real thing. In the end, I also became online social friends with some people I messaged with.

I used to ask all the call center people I met or worked with if they had a Friendster account. 99% of them resoundingly affirmed my question. This only means Friendster is one of the best “free” medium to recruit people. The huge percentage of its global demographics belongs to the 18-35 yeras of age, the prime, young age of entering the corporate world and going up the business ladder. So, besides recruiting agents, I also invited supervisors and managers, too. This is where I invited, met, interviewed and eventually hired my Operations Manager, Clarice Estrella, for Workspresso Inc. in June of 2008. She still works with us up to now.

Linked In -www.linkedin.com.

Though I was with Ryze for some time, I moved to Linked In because it had better GUI (graphical user interface) and was far easier to use. Within my network, Linked In would allow me the basic activities (adding people in their networks) and that of the groups I belonged to. Like many, I started linking with friends and acquaintances before I trekked to new ones.

Linked In is not my free recruitment tool for entry level or supervisor-level professionals because many that I’ve networked with are managers, entrepreneurs and professionals. Statistically, Linked In’s demographic data rate 49% belonging to the 26-35 years old and 24% in the 36-45 years old range, as compared to the younger crowd in Friendster, with 39% in the 18-25 years old bracket and 36% among the 26-35 years of age.

Leaving a marketing phrase in your Linked In “Status” isn’t going to work. I’ve tried that. You’ve got to go out of your way and find those likely candidates one at a time. There are good search parameters in Linked In that you can use for free, more powerful than the social networking sites. You may leave marketing messages within the groups that you join but many of them do not accept such types of text. If ever they do, my thinking is it wouldn’t even make a dent in interest, readership or eyeballs.

I got many messages from people who were inviting me to resell or market their products or services. The norm was to disregard these messages but, being the networker that I am, I responded cordially even if I was turning them down, but opened the door to other products or services they would have in the future that will be a match to what I did and, of course, letting them also know what I do. There have been plenty near misses on the course of these interactions but a few networks are now on the drawing board pending contracts and agreements between us.

I was also surprised to get positive responses from people who worked with venture capital companies when I peddled the idea (yes, it was only an idea) of a business and I needed seed money to make it work. I probably sent around 30 private messages and got 10 positive responses and 5 asking for more detailed information. Wow! But mind you, it’s still about the good basics of positive correspondence. You’ve got to edit and re-edit your message to perfection.

I created my first group in Linked In called “Call Center Directory Philippines” which now has 164 members since August 10, 2008 — without marketing this group to anyone in my offline and online social or business networks, not a single e-mail to join the group. So, that’s about 18 people joining the group per month on their own accord. Good or bad? I really can’t answer you there. I haven’t done anything other than manually accept the registrations to the group, adding each one to my own Linked In network and welcoming them to the group. I know in time I will find the right idea to use this channel but for now, it remains an open group for anyone with common interests in the call center industry in the Philippines.

Facebook -www.facebook.com.

Statistically, Facebook boasts 185 million subscribers worldwide. The United States has 58 million, Canada has 11 million and the Philippines with 1.17 million. With the latter, 61.3% are female, 40.6% are 18-24 years old, 32.2% are 25-34 years old, 10.9% are 35-44 years old and (surprise) 10.5% are 14-17 years old.

My daughter was 11 years old when she told me to create a Facebook account. At her behest, I did and since I knew the general functions of an online social networking site, I created a profile using the settings and texts that came from my Friendster and Linked In accounts. At first, I was just socializing with many of the people I added to my network belonging to those I met every week or so. I probably logged into Facebook once a week as Frienster was still more popular with the people I worked with.

A few months after I started Workspresso Inc., I went back to Facebook and looked around, wondering how I could use the site as a way to market my company and the things we did. At first, I only sent private messages, much like what I did with Friendster and Linked In. Lo and behold — I usually got no reply. “Hmmm… what’s up with Facebook?” I wondered.

I looked at “Groups” and “Pages” and created my first groups, “JustGo Philippines” and “The Travel Outlet Philippines”, as I was part of both companies — the former as a Project Director and the latter as a Consultant. JustGo Philippines has 189 members and Travel Outlet Philippines with 274. It was probably easier for others to invite their friends to the Travel Outlet since it was also easy to understand that it was a travel agency company promoting itself in Facebook; while JustGo Philippines, a travel portal still in the works, was harder to understand.

However, this March or April, Facebook reengineered its Pages to look more like a wall of streaming messages from its members — or “Fans” as they called it — and I’ve seen many groups trying to switch its members to its page. Egad! Asking people to transfer or move is not going to be easy. I haven’t done so with the groups I created as I do not know how to ask the members and why should they move or transfer. Until I get a “blinding glimpse of the obvious” (famous line from the book “Barbarians at the Gates”) will I attempt to do so.

Which only means that if you intend to do marketing in Facebook by inviting people to be part of your group, “Pages” is a more productive way of doing so than “Groups.” I just hope Facebook has some undercover plan to reinvent “Groups” to something equal or better than “Pages.”

I experimented with “The Travel Outlet Philippines” and sent two global messages on travel packages. For one, I got about 20% inquiring more about it and 3% purchasing for the product. The other package wasn’t that all enticing and I didn’t get a single customer.

I’ve also joined (and unjoined) several groups and pages in Facebook that provide me with information of my interest (and disinterest). There are social groups like “Barangay Merville” which represents 440 people who used to or still live in the gated subdivision I grew up and are now scattered all over the globe. Target, the retail company, is another group and page I belong to and just read how Target hired an experienced Facebook marketer named “AKQA” to help them re-do the things they were doing (see Article).

I’ve created 4 “Pages” in Facebook but have not yet marketed these pages. I also linked my blog to one of the pages that allowed an automatic way of creating content (called “Notes”) in the page and informed the members of the page that a new “Update” was available for viewing at the page. So far, I’m not at the 100 mark of members for that page.

In Summary

So, besides your usual e-mail and existing website, the online social networking does work to a certain degree. Of course, overdoing things (messaging your members everyday) will likely be a downfall to you honest intent of good information and knowledge about you, your organization and the things you do (or sell). You’ve got to be careful in how you present and market yourself in online social networks.

It's all about "conversations."

I remember reading about the internet and know that the idea of the market in the olden times as the best description to how people and organizations should treat it. Historically, markets (as in wet markets or dry markets) were the center stage of a region where people come to buy and sell. However, the other thing about markets during those times were the travelers who would come by and visit the market to tell people of their stories from regions afar, besides selling or trading their wares. In that era and the concept of the internet today which no one in the world owns (just like a public market), what makes it exist and profit are the “conversations” and “interactions” of people among themselves. By definition, a conversation is an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas between two or more people. The moment you kill the conversation, you lose the people who may one day buy or sell with you.

Most corporate websites desist from allowing visitors (and even members) to have a conversation with them like leaving a remark or comment on the web page, thinking that many would just curse, cuss or humiliate them. So, they create their websites looking exactly like a catalog. It’s like allowing your prospective market to come in to your store but putting packaging tape on their mouths before they enter. Some may actually buy or transact with you because they need you and your product or service and there’s no one around to provide them the same thing. However, a big percentage would simply move on.

Think about it! Do you think 80% of mankind are evil? Which means everything that you do is under that impression? Don’t penalize the many because of what a few will do. Allow people to have a selection of ways (not just a toll free number) to have a conversation with you through your online storefront. Respond and reply back all the time, even if they cuss. You can opt to remove the bad messages anytime. You can also screen remarks but make sure it’s posted on your site immediately, not days later.

Online social networks and websites are all about “conversations.” And the thing about it is they also must be “Free, Fast and Forever.” To remove one’s ability to start a conversation on the web means killing the only means your site will succeed. The market is “people” and people want to have a meaningful conversation.