Web 2.0 and social networking are not advertising. As you’ve probably noticed, real social networkers get very upset when they expect to be networked with and instead, they get advertised to. For a true social networker, it’s like you’re at home at the dinner table with your family, when that BAD, BAD man bursts in, uninvited – he didn’t even knock! – and tries to sell you a used car.

You’d get testy, too. Some even get vindictive and vengeful. And yet, a lot of businesses see the internet, including Web 2.0, strictly as another advertising medium. Better … it’s FREE advertising! Which leads many of them to exuberantly present their products and services to you at your dinner table, as you try to have a conversation with your online “family.” Talk about a bull in a china shop!

The true business value of Web 2.0 and the internet is the opportunity to easily start and to then continue to build relationships with a LOT of people in your target market. When you focus on the numbers … the click-throughs, the inbound links, Google Pagerank, etc. … instead of the relationships, then you are putting the emphasis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.

Can you get customers online? Absolutely. You can get a ton of them.

Can you advertise directly? Not in Web 2.0 you can’t. But you can sure sit down at the dinner table and join in the conversation with a lot of like-minded people. You can build a relationship with those people and then casually let it slip what you do. And since people do business with people they like, you will get business.

But they have to see that you like them first. That is what will get you the business rewards of social networking. Web 2.0 means you must go in with the pure heart of a social networker … or risk getting your heart removed and served to you by the inmates.