So there I sit in the lobby of my hotel at the NAR convention and a little cutie starts chatting with me. He was a young kid about 25 or 30 with a funky hairdo. He casually mentions how tiring conventions are and how hard it is to network. You see he is an account representative for a company that provides "unlimited sales leads". Imagine that, leads that are *unlimited*.
Photo Credit: rutty's photostream
Being the Twitterzilla that I am I asked what online social networks he belonged to. To my shock and horror he said NONE. I told him he was missing the boat. Had he been involved with online social networks he would have known hundreds and maybe even thousands of consumers and future customers BEFORE he even got to the trade show.
Social networking is a waste of time, he said. This shocked me mostly because of his age. So I looked at the youth and ignorance exuberance in the chair next to me and wondered how someone could be missing the train so badly. I don't want to get the kid fired or the lead company pished off so I'm not mentioning their name. I do wonder how they could have an online business but not be involved in online networking, not Twitter, not blogging, not Active Rain, not Linked-In.
The fact that this person and his company has no online reputation, interaction or network made me actually recoil. All credibilty was instantly stripped away because they weren't rolling with the now. He'll be the last guy advertising in the phone book yellow pages.
How fresh can their leads be if they aren't on the clue train, anyway? They're probably still listening to eight track tapes in that company break room.
If you aren't networking socially online you might want to consider getting started. You will eventually have customers, clients and referring agents who may not want to do business with you because you aren't grasping technology. There, I said it.
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