I’ve written a lot about finding and maintaining relationships with strategic partners. In case you don’t remember who those are, they are the non-competing, complementary businesses to yours. In other words, the people who are marketing to the same clients as you.

While businesses do use social media to find clients, many forget that they can look for and “meet” strategic partners there as well.

Last week, I was running my Netmasters group, and James Meyers of Celestial Cheesecakes had an “aha!” moment when he realized he could use Twitter to reach out to restaurants who want to sell his cheese cakes. He’d been trying to figure out how to use Twitter to find individual customers, and he’d gotten stuck on strategy. Once he realized he could use social media to find and build relationships with restaurants and coffee shops, he suddenly saw the value.

By the way, James’ cheesecakes are wonderful! Check him out and follow him on Twitter (linked to in his name above).

So who are you looking for as strategic partners in social media? And how can we help you get to them?

Tags: Referrals, Relationship building, sales, social media

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 9:09 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.