Here’s something to get you through a Tuesday without BNI!  The final days of the Social Butterfly Effect are upon us.  As we wrap up this social media challenge, think about what we’ve been accomplishing over the last several weeks.  Do you think the course of someone’s business has been changed for the better by our efforts?  Has yours?

If you believe the answer to that last question is “no”, I have two more words for you: Givers Gain.  Sound familiar? 🙂 The prime philosophy behind BNI can be applied to anything we do with our businesses (and lives), but applies in particular to the giving and receiving of recommendations in the social media world.  I would hazard a guess that those who gave the most of their time to this challenge also gained the most.  And probably gained a few pounds, as well, from those Sugar Baker cookies!

As you know, the premise of our Social Butterfly Effect was that by “flapping our wings” (giving recommendations and reviews) online, we could “create a storm” (new business) for our fellow chapter members.  A sound theory… but in social media, as in any corporate boardroom, the “what have you done for me lately” philosophy is always in vogue.  To keep our businesses top-of-mind on the ‘Net, to keep working on creating that storm, we need to keep up our efforts to share/compliment/recommend each other, not just for the few weeks of a chapter-wide game, but for each and every day we’re online.

With that in mind, we intend to morph this particular game into a week-by-week “attraction” for our chapter, by integrating it with both the weekly Speaker Series and our current SBJ ad campaign, to create a “Featured Member/Business of the Week”.  The details are still being finalized, but we should have an annoucement at the closed meeting next week.  And I think it very fitting that our very first Featured Member, given all that she has done during the SBE challenge, will be Karen Monnier of The Sugar Baker!

In the meantime, use the last few days of September to look through all of our businesses to see whom you could still review or recommend.  And remember always to try to “share” Business Pages, for those of you on Facebook.  Here is a recap of the seven weeks of SBE, so if you happened to be out for a week, pay particular attention to the members you might have missed.

One final thought on our SBE Challenge: Thank you to EVERYONE who participated. Even if you only did one single thing during the seven weeks of the game, that one single thing might have made a difference to someone, or might yet do so. There is power in what we say and do, power to change the course of events for everyone in this chapter, so let’s keep on doing what we can!