Penny Power

Online social networking isn’t all about your gran keeping up with your kids on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, before any of these names really took off it was business that led the online social revolution.

Although it has arguably only come of age in the last year or two, LinkedIn, a familiar site to many readers, was founded back in 2002 – a year before mySpace and two years before Facebook.

But, in business networking terms, the granddaddy of them all is Ecademy, set up way back in 1998 by Penny Power and her husband Thomas.

Ecademy is a niche online social network for entrepreneurs.

And, as Power points out both when we speak to her – and also in her new book on social networking, Know me, Like me, Follow me- it’s happy to stay that way.

As a pioneer in the market the company has, she tells EN, had many approaches from companies looking to buy it. She says, “Ecademy has always been niche and it’s always been a community rather than a platform, and so we have had lots of people come to us, and there are always rumours about people talking about buying us because we’ve become quite a signifi cant brand and we’re growing really well.

“But we never, so far, particularly like the types of deals that we’ve had brought to the table because they’ve not been right for the members. One of them just wanted to buy us and close the whole platform, close the whole community down. I wouldn’t do that to the members.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that she wouldn’t be interested if the right offer came along. She explains, “It feels like a child that you know is going to grow up and one day will leave home – you want it to have the right future, you know?”

Power is, as one would expect, pretty evangelical about the whole social networking thing.

Her book talks about developing networks that are “both deep and broad” but how, we wonder, can an entrepreneur possibly do justice to such an online network and still have any time to run their business?

She says, “The biggest transition for people who haven’t grown up with the technology is really understanding how it should make you more productive, not steal your time. And, for me, I am in touch every day with thousands and thousands of people.

“I can easily do a blog and know it will be seen by a lot of people. I can easily send out Twitter messages, and I can easily set up my system so that I know the people that I am following closely.

“You can’t possibly know everybody in your wider network, and you have to accept that, but you have to give the people in your wide network the opportunity to have a conversation with you and to start liking you.”

All very well but, in practical terms, what should a businessperson who has never bothered with social networking do when they get started?

Power says, “The fi rst thing is really to understand what your value is inside a network. A lot of people fl y into a network and make a lot of noise; they create a lot of white noise around them and then actually get so scared by that noise that they jump out of it.

“So you’ve got to start off by thinking, ‘What is the brand I’m wanting to create, why would somebody be attracted towards me? What is my contribution above and beyond just trying to cut an invoice? Why would somebody want to read my blogs?’ Nobody’s going to want to read your blog if it’s just an advert.”

This is a point Power makes repeatedly in her book – members of networks like hers need to offer information and advice, and not simply be self-promotional or “broadcasts”.

And what of that other side of social networking – members of staff saying compromising things about your business while using sites like Facebook?

“For me it’s like any form of communication, whether it’s online of offline, you want your staff to behave appropriately. So I think that yes, maybe you should develop a social media policy. It’s no different from saying, ‘I wouldn’t want you giving out your business card in a wine bar but bein abusive and horrible at the same time.’”

However, she says, employers need to understand that younger staff will come already plugged into a variety of social networks and have “social capital” that they stifl e at their peril: “This is a new, transparent world and if you over-control you won’t be able to employ the people who have created social capital.

“Their social capital is their standing inside a network, how many people they are connected to, what groups they run, what they write about. That becomes an asset for that individual that they’re not going to want to leave outside on the pavement when they join an organisation.”

With youth unemployment as it is we wouldn’t have thought the youngsters could afford to be so choosy, but we get the point. Their social capital isn’t just an asset for them – it should become one for their employer too.

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