Take a minute to reflect on your childhood (or even your adult life), and you will probably realize you are all too familiar with the concept of the Mom Circle. It starts with your proud mother talking about you with one person. And almost instantaneously, whatever she says, everyone knows about it. Your best friend’s mom, your second-grade teacher – I  found it absolutely mortifying as a kid.

So it’s no wonder when social media sites like Facebook and Twitter started sprouting up, I initially steered clear. Why would I want another way to spread my personal business around?

I was even more skeptical when social media started infiltrating the business world. However, I have to concede that I am now a convert.

Fast-forward a year or so from my mortified self to my entrepreneurial self, and the Mom Circle was suddenly my most useful business tool. My neighbor and I wanted to break into the lemonade stand business, but we lived in a cul-de-sac – great for scootering, horrible for lemonade stand publicity. The solution to getting ourselves recognized was the Mom Circle. We launched our business the same weekend my mom was holding a garage sale, and with just one word from my mom, suddenly we were known across all of town as reputable beverage-selling duo featured at a trusted business event. That was all it took. We made twelve whole dollars!

My lemonade stand taught me a simple, but genius, marketing rule: use your connections. And now I see that sites like Facebook and Twitter make connecting with people easier than ever. Even if I don’t like sharing the play-by-play of my personal life through social media sites, there is no more denying that they are extremely useful business tools. So I guess there really isn’t a reason to be afraid, and I want to share my newfound fearlessness. If you take the time to make social media sites work in the best interest of your business, they will only help you. Unfortunately, I can’t promise that your mom won’t ever embarrass you again.

Marcella Vieraitis is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.