Last night I was invited to Apero Entrepreneurs which is an Anglo-French networking group for aspiring entrepreneurs in London. I held a series of short 1-2-1 coaching sessions on my favourite topic of social media.

Apero Entrepreneurs basically offer their members the chance to speak to an 'expert' in a chosen field at their monthly meetups and this time the turn had come to social networking and for the Swedish non-French speaker (that would be me) to help out as best possible.

I had five 'patients' at my surgery last night, the one I wanted to mention is Christelle who runs a small business making gluten-free cakes, the company is called Gluten Free Delices. She is operating on a tight budget and is already doing a few things on social media which was a great start. Her objectives are to get more customers (B2C and B2B), increase brand awareness and build up an online community of fans. And yes you guessed it, some of the cakes are featured at the top of this post.

Christelle has a website and a blog, on top of that she has a Facebook Page and a Twitter presence. Reviewing what she is doing currently, I came up with a few ideas.

Do you remember sending your first email? It was a pretty cool feeling. I am sure you remember receiving your first email as well, an even better feeling. Emails were one of the keys to the success of the internet I would say. Some providers tried to charge their customers for every email sent but in the end it became completely free and it's heavily reduced our reliance on sending post (or snail mail if you will). So far so good, for a while (well 10 years or so) email marketing was the future of the web and building an email list of subscribers was a top priority for savvy online operators.

Then social came along

A few years later we started using social media channels to communicate. It started with blogs (and comments), moved on to social bookmarking and finally social networks like Facebook and thousands of others. Marketeers jumped on the bandwaggon and we now have branded Pages, feeds, profiles and what have you. I must admit that Facebook have done very well in terms of driving traffic, activity and repeat visitors to their social network. They seem to be faring well on social. But what about the others...?

Google Plus (or was it Gmail)

Have you signed up for Google Plus yet? If not, I'm sure you have received numerous emails about it. Do you have a Gmail account? You are probably bombarded with Google Plus messages from your contacts and Google themselves. The big G's whole business model here is built around pimping their email service, and then emailing everyone ad nauseum about it. You could ask whether this is social media or email media. Hopefully Google Plus will grow in to something with a life of its own and not having to rely on 20 year old technology (emails) to promote a cutting edge social network.

Our friend Vincenzo Cosenza likes to create nice infographics about social networks. He recently published an update to his world mape of social networks June 2011. It makes for interesting reading to compare this to the state of the social networking world back in June 2009 as per the image below.