This is a story about whether social media actually works to sell your business to new customers. As a “digitally-savvy” customer, I was confronted recently with the personal challenge of finding a service provider to work with in two entirely different industries. The first was an accountant, and the second was a builder for a home improvement project. How did I go about finding the right providers to work with?

The first place I started was search – but for local providers it didn’t turn out to be that useful because there were too many results and no way to really compare them. Instead, I found myself using a combination of polling and browsing my social network for suggestions, and resorted to the decidedly traditional method of finding phone numbers and calling these businesses directly.

(more…)