Georgia Networking Guide

Networking Event Finders recently put out a national query to ask Networking Organization Leaders how the economy was affecting their networking groups.  Is business down?  Are people flocking to networking events?  How is the explosion of online Social networking affecting face-to-face networking?

One of the first responses…and the most comprehensive, came from Atlanta’s own Wendy Kinney, owner of PowerCore, a real power player in the networking world of Georgia.  Here is what she had to say:

“As people lose clients they either:
         1. Look for ways to replace them, or
         2. Look for ways to shrink.

If they look for ways to replace they often:
        1. Find us online and join, or
         2. Rejoin!

So – our business in up from our online marketing efforts, and Members are rejoining. (We’ve had 3-5 rejoins a week since the first of the year). 

The number of new Members who are introduced by current Members is also up, because current Members are getting out more, meeting new people, and using an invitation to visit their Team as a follow through tool.  (As I was typing this Veronica …looking through the weekend mail… said “I’ve got a dozen applications here”, seriously, this is not hyperbole!”)

Here’s how we’re down: As people shrink their marketing, they often go out of business. So we’re experiencing a lot of Realtors and mortgage brokers who are looking for a new career, but:

Here’s how we’re up: We have a waiting list for the Hot 10 seats. So we fill that spot in, oh, conservatively, 12 seconds. And that new Member brings, on average, 4 new people to the table, 1.3 of whom join. (The others do business with Members, though, so Members get benefit from all 4 visitors.)

Here’s how we’re down: It’s normal, healthy, profitable for a Team to cycle. We’ve got a 21 Member Team that has gone down 4 Members in the last two weeks. Momentum will push them up 8. They’ll be 25 Members before 4th of July.  If, instead, they had gone down one Member a month for the past four months, they might never have recovered. They might have moved, slowly, down to 7 or 8 Members, and stagnated.

We often ask stagnating Teams to disband. They either respond with “Hell no! We’re making money! Leave us alone!” or they nod and say, “Yeah. It’s time.”  In March we talked two Teams (with 8 or fewer Members) into going down. We’ve been trying to get them down for three years! Now we were successful. Some of them will be able to transfer to other Teams, but not all. (We don’t allow more than one Member from a disbanded Team to join another Team . . . there was something unhealthy about the Team that didn’t survive, we don’t want to infect a healthy Team with those behaviors.)

We’re Up because of Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter. We have someone in our office (Jeremy) whose focus is on social networking as a marketing tool for us. We actively invite past Members and never-been-Members to participate in our Social Networking groups. We take pictures of the Members and past Members who visit our booth at business expos, and post them online in real time. We take pictures of Members at Orientation and InfoMinute Seminar, and put them online. (Saturday night I was at a Member’s wedding. I had their Mr & Mrs photo on Facebook before the reception; reception photos of current and past Members went up in the car as we were driving home.)  It’s very possible this activity is what is increasing the new Members who say they found us online, we don’t differentiate right now between our own web site and others when we ask the question. We also have 3 blogs. One targeted for Members (but anyone can participate), one for officers only (each Team has 5 trained officers) and one for coaches only. We can see views, which average 74 per post, even though comments are typically under 10.

Net: We’re up!! We’re fortunate to be in a business that successful people gravitate to magnetically when they are in growth mode themselves. When people are not in growth mode, they are not our clients.  All good.”

Refer and prosper,   
Wendy L. Kinney
PowerGenerator
Wendy@PowerCore.net”