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For those of us in "me too" markets differentiation can be a real problem.

This is particularly true in the business services sector, 1960 Fleer baseball cards the majority of start-ups are, but it's also true of any product or service which is custom fit Tammy doll individual client requirements.

Our competitive advantage isn't that we help people buy property, or broker mortgages, or design/build web sites. It's in the way we do it. The ways we help the client understand what's important, and what isn't. The ways we use our expertise to minimize client costs, and risks. The ways we commit to client satisfaction, in order to build those on-going relationships that bring us repeat orders and referrals.

When our competitive advantage resides in our ability to add value, it's awful hard to stand out from the crowd. Everybody claims to do the same. Using our marketing pages to describe it just positions us alongside everybody else. Explaining how we do it in that little Adwords box is close to impossible.

Marketing sites and paid search advertising do nothing to help us stand out from the crowd.

But the Social Media sites are an entirely different proposition. They provide us with a platform for really demonstrating profiles, personalities and expertise that doesn't exist in the traditional marketing media, and for the Superman comics at least they're free of charge.

These Social Media sites (there are thousands) give us the opportunity to meet lots of new people, some of whom will be prospective customers/clients and others who will know people who are looking for what we offer. They probably aren't looking to buy right now, but when they do, we can be established as a credited, and differentiated, provider. That's a whole lot better than being just another Ad in Google's paid search results.

However, that isn't the point of this particular post. For the moment we're talking Chatty Cathy credibility and differentiation.

For the purposes of the article we can limit the discussion to Linked In, but depending on our business there are other sites offering the same kind of opportunities, including Xing, Facebook, and literally 1,000s of Ning and Collective X sites. The really advanced thinkers can add Twitter to the list, but that's a different subject we'll get to later.

As people who have accounts with Linked In will know, joining is as simple as registering with an email address and password.

The site immediately offers to search existing accounts for people we already know (via our address book) and invite those it finds to "connect" with us. It also offers to email invitations to our contacts who aren't already registered, asking them to join.

Next we create our "profile" summarizing our career, education and interests. Fatima tobacco cards can add our blog addresses and Linked In automatically fetches and displays our recent posts. Then we can ask our contacts to write recommendations on our profile and publish the testimonials we want visitors to see.

Within a few minutes, our entire profile is up and running, and our network starts to build. We have our value proposition summarized on one page for anybody to visit, and we can direct others we meet to find out about us, sending them the link to our public profile.

This differentiates us from the competition, demonstrates our expertise and confirms our capabilities. We're somebody - not just another three line Ad.

Moving on, we can join groups of like minded individuals, ask other members questions and answer others requests for help. We meet new people and spread our sphere of influence this way.

But for the purposes of this post at least, most importantly we can demonstrate our value add. This isn't like a few "me too" lines - it's real answers to real questions and lets the real "me" show through.

Even if we don't meet new contacts to work with we still have somewhere to send people who are interested in knowing more about us.

We no longer need to "sell" ourselves, just invite people to find out about us.

A well thought out and presented profile on Social Media sites illustrates who and what we are, as individuals, and the business offer comes along for the ride.

It creates a whole new competitive advantage and changes the rules of the game.

Steve Reeves is Founder and CEO of Front Office Box, the Business 2.0 solution for helping smaller businesses manage plans, tasks, schedules and relationships. His passion is helping them exploit the Internet to increase opportunities and enhance capabilities.

Steve is a 30 year veteran of sales and sales management roles in the B2B space, primarily software, consulting and outsourcing.

Visit Steve's blog at frontofficebox.ning.comfrontofficebox.ning.com

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