Alright, I admit it, the title is provocative. Ok, Viadéo lets you have a dynamic address book. Ok, it may possibly help you find a job. But when it comes to mass sales prospecting, until now I had my doubts, but now I have numbers.
For quite a while I had the feeling that I understood nothing about business social networks when I heard some clients and partners explain all the incredible business they were doing through Viadéo. Since I had never received a convincing answer to my simple question: “Can you give me a specific example? It would really help me understand,” I therefore decided to carry out a quantified experiment.
Building a “network”: easy
With the agreement of a long-time client, who like me is game AND skeptical (and not septic), we therefore created a Viadéo profile in his wife’s name. We declared her as a member of his company, a B2B and B2C electrical equipment distribution company.
We then applied the right method to build a “network”: click on “Add to my contacts” every time a profile crosses our path, if possible related to the business sector.
712 Contacts in 3 months
We only had to do it for the first 50. Then, as a knock-on effect, we regularly received requests. 3 months later, there we were, rich with 712 contacts. First nice surprise: apparently, they were mostly partners and potential clients. So we started sharing a few updates through our news feed.
A few months later, somewhat naively, we decided to carry out a correlation analysis between our Viadéo “address book” and the store’s customer database. Drum roll, the figure came to… Zero! Out of a customer database of 6000 names, including about 2000 new customers during the test period, not a single Viadéo “Contact” placed the slightest order.
Conclusion: long live Adwords
It would be a little hasty to conclude, as the sensationalist title of this post suggests, that Viadéo is useless, including for finding new clients. I imagine that if we had spent time building a relationship with certain contacts, the result might have been different. At the same time, generally speaking, the magic of the web is being able to reach the greatest number of people without precisely having to do one-to-one relationship-building.
So we are going to keep acquiring our 20 daily customers with Adwords. We pay, that’s bad, but God is it effective. Too bad, we still won’t be able to say “me too” to the statement “I found loads of clients on Viadéo”.
