The Philantrepreneur Journal JAN 2015 | Page 23

Paola Seminario Founder and CEO SocialMedia AMP’d. A community called SocialMedia for SocialChange to raise awareness of philanthropic causes and promote positive social change. She has BA in Psychology and a MBA. www.paolaseminario.com Get Social For a Cause (While Building Your Business!) W ord of mouth marketing has been around since the beginning of time. When you provide a product or a service for someone, they typically tell two or three people they know. They tell two or three other people, so on and so forth. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful tools you can have… if you provide great products and services. It can also be very dangerous if you don’t. One of the biggest reasons that word of mouth is so powerful is that you are not the one selling yourself to your potential clients. You have already “sold” yourself by providing great products and services, your happy customers will advocate for you out of their own free will, because they believe in you. One of the biggest questions I get is how personal should your business content be? With the advent of social media, we can literally start a business on a Facebook page or a blog. We can build business profiles on multiple social platforms to promote ourselves with little or no budget. If done intelligently, we can also take word of mouth to a whole new level. There are countless review sites where our clients can rate our products and services, so it is more important than ever to provide the best that we have to give. Social media provides our clients the opportunity to share our business profiles and content with their friends and followers with the click of a button, which could lead to a monumentally larger reach. Wouldn’t it be better to have two degrees of separation when marketing your business? So what does word of mouth marketing have to do with a philanthropic entrepreneur? I’ll tell you. When I meet with new clients, one of the questions I ask them is, “What philanthropic ties doe you have?” In other words, do you donate money, volThe Philantrepreneur Journal 23