Is Social Networking Just Politically Correct Multi-Level Network Marketing?

By Don Osborne

Use social networking websites to build your small business!

That message or something similar may have hit your email in-box. Many small business gurus have promoted the idea of social networking as a marketing tool to gain new customers directly or through the referral process associated with social networking.

At the heart of small business "social networking" is an expectation your "friends" and their "friends" will become a source of new business. Sounds like what's at the core of multi-level marketing: a business method for moving goods, services and opportunity by tapping into the multiple levels of people who know people - you tell your "friends" and they'll tell their "friends".

Or is it?

Most small business guru advice focuses on joining a social networking website as a way to create relationships you can develop over time into a business transaction or, worst case scenario, a socially networked referral source of new business.

If you've joined a social networking website you quickly realized you need to encourage your friends to join under you and also attract others you may not yet know to join under you. Without your friends joining, it's more difficult to convince people you don't know to add you to their "friends" list and vice versa.

Bottom line, without a new group of friends, who aren't currently members of the social network you've just joined being brought into that social network, the growth of the social network you're building can be very slow. It may never reach a level of critical mass sufficient to create enough relationships to produce business for you.

If business creation was the compelling reason for joining a social network, you'd better be prepared to cause others you already know to join you and, in turn, have percentage of them do the same.

Sound like multi-level marketing?

Maybe not - perhaps it's just a social networking experience defined by Webster's as:

"the use of a website to connect with people who share personal or professional interests, place of origin, education at a particular school, etc."

Social Networking vs. Multi-Level Network Marketing?

1. The controversy surrounding multi-leveling marketing vs. the positive enthusiasm for social networking as a life force.

2. The core element of "friend to friend" referrals stacked in multiple levels of entry based on who knows whom placed in order of joining a multi-level marketing opportunity vs. becoming part of a social network of shared interests stacked by the order of "friends" joining in either width or depth.

3. Sharing products, services and opportunity vs. sharing "interests, place of origin, education at a particular school, etc".

4. The hope of new income through endless word-of-mouth referrals vs. a growing social network of friends to expand your life's opportunities.

Is social networking just politically correct multi-level network marketing?

Share your thoughts; maybe that will foster a social network of its own. Unless, of course, you think this is all about selling something. Than, I suppose, you may have just joined a multi-level marketing network.

Don Osborne authors The Profit Puzzle Online Workbook, a small business @ home start up to success workbook to help you plan, finance, start up, run, grow, sell your small home based business ideas. For your Free 32 Ways to Profit click on: http://www.profitpuzzle.com.

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[Multi level marketing]

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