As people continue to debate the return on investment for social media activities, one of the more important components they often overlook is the comparative amount of time many of them are already spending on business development activities.  Among many other benefits, the activities associated with social media need to be considered business development as it is activity focused on creating awareness, building relationships, and increasing connections.  Many people seem to have no issue with spending two or three and up to five hours a week on face-to-face networking.  Yet, these same people seem to be reluctant to engage in those same two-to-five hours of social media networking work.  For many, this feels like a waste of time.

Let’s talk about this. While we can compare the differences and the real advantages between the two, the bottom line is that whether your business development activities are social media centered or face-to-face network oriented, the power of the conversation and the connection drives everything.  This is what causes me to challenge those who value face-to-face networking over social media.

• The Potential of Many over the Hope of the Few:

Even if a networking event has 800 people in it, how many people can you effectively meet?  More importantly, how many can you effectively engage in preliminary chatter and introduce yourself to them.  You cannot build a relationship or close a sale at a networking event, you can only explore the potential to create interest in one.  With social media it is the same, except you have the ability to introduce yourself to hundreds of thousands of people every time you initiate a conversation through social media.

• Defining a Valuable Connection:

Relationships can be very effectively started on either medium.  How you develop them is dependent upon your commitment to real relationship building.  Effective networking relationships take time to build trust and rapport.  The best networking relationships are always cultivated over time.  Social media relationships are the same way.  The problem is, most people spend too much time selling and pitching on either platform to effectively build great relationships.  Which leads us to the next point—the conversation.

• The Effective Conversation:

Great business relationships require time to develop.  I have noticed that there is way too much “selling” taking place at both networking events and on social media platforms.  Both platforms offer people a great opportunity to create interest, establish connections and build relationships.  The only difference is that the poor, though ignorant, networker gets to make contact with the people they are turning off.  Hence, they confuse contact with activity and potential productive results.  With social media, the bad networker doesn’t get to see the people that are deleting his spammy tweets.

• Use Your Imagination:

If you knew you were having an open-ended conversation with 1,000 people with one message, blog, or tweat how would you feel about social media?  How would you feel about that opportunity? Pretend you have an opportunity to introduce yourself to 1,000 people at once.  Would you pitch them or introduce yourself? Would you find out what they are up to?  Would you work to discover what is important to them at that time?  As a very good networker you would introduce yourself and engage all of them in a conversation that made them the focal point. After all, that is true and productive relationship development.

Guess what, that is also networking and relationship building the social media way.  You probably haven’t gotten social media or think there is an ROI, because you have spent way too much time “pitching” or acting like an “expert.”  Start over.  Introduce yourself and start a conversation.  Listen, learn, and build some relationships, build a lot of relationships.  After you have engaged in this for several months, then talk to me.