Referrals

Let’s say you need to find a technical resource. The best thing to do is ask someone you know to recommend someone.

(CONSPIRATORIAL This is why most small businesses grow through referral marketing.)

If you can’t find a recommendation from your network, the second-best place to go to socialise your query is on LinkedIn.

This can be that you’re looking for a fractional CTO (which I happen to do), or for IT support, or for a new CRM system, or some data warehousing work. Anything technical, I would straightforwardly just avoid Google now.

The reason for this is that most of the information out there that is self-published by suppliers is dreck. A decade of content marketing where every single supplier of whatever technical doodad you need means that you either get a) first party content from the supplier, or if it’s a particularly competed keyword you get b) round-up articles that are written for SEO and have zero expertise behind them, or paid ads.

The only way that you can now find actually good people is through peer-to-peer recommendations. Just… don’t reply to cold direct message outreach, it only encourages them.

15/Aug/2023