In business, social media can’t be an
afterthought
Two unrelated recent posts on Social Media Today got me thinking again about how large companies and small businesses still need education on understanding the purposes and value of using social media.
One post described the flawed attempt by college football’s Bowl Championship Series to start a Twitter account, ostensibly to communicate with fans, answer questions and spruce up the image of the much-maligned bowl system. Heck, fans, most coaches and even the president want a playoff system to crown a football national champion. (Me, too.)
The result? A PR nightmare, according to Social Media Today, as @InsideThe BCS tweeted about 30 times (now up to 57) while screenload after screenload of critics weighed in with negative comments. And SMT wrote whoever was tweeting (they suspect a PR firm) misquoted Florida coach Urban Meyer as being a supporter of the BCS system. He’s not.
While I salute the BCS folks for attempting to enter the social space, it’s clear they needed to think through a strategy and prepare in advance. They should have known they would face an onslaught. Now that the bus has hit them, it’ll be interesting to see how they respond.
The second post focused on a conference where discussion centered on how companies are turning to Gen Y employees to handle their social media marketing.
My take: As we previously wrote, age is no longer a factor in social media. Facebook is gaining more Boomers; Twitter is now attracting Gen Yers. In a bad economy, people of all ages are turning to LinkedIn. So why would companies look to Gen Yers only to handle their social media responsibilities? It’s not like they all have a special gene that makes them marketers.
Whoever handles your company’s social media profiles reflects upon your company. If that employee, intern, contractor, consultant or PR/marketing firm doesn’t know what they’re doing, they can do harm. Many companies have already been burned by well-meaning, low-paid and inexperienced people representing their brand.
I’m reminded of the large Atlanta law firm who advertised earlier this year for someone to manage their social media identity. These lawyers, who spend their days carefully crafting legal arguments for large amounts of money, were paying a miniscule salary and clearly wanted a recent college grad. Nothing against recent college grads — I have two children graduating in the next year — but it was clear this firm wanted the benefits of social media without a seasoned professional. Why would a group of lawyers open themselves to such risk? Let’s hope they were lucky.
If you own a business and you need help in launching — and sustaining — your social media profiles, you should think through who you put in that role. Do you really leave it to an intern? Or the IT guy/Webmaster who can code great things, but can’t spell or write a comprehensible sentence?
Updating Twitter or a Facebook business page doesn’t require technical skills. Anyone of any age can do it. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, the challenge is finding someone with a mature-enough marketing and business sense to meet your needs.
There is great value for businesses to gain through social media. Don’t underestimate that value if you need help. Hiring or contracting someone on the cheap could end up being very costly.
Social marketing: Influence the influencers
“In the future, the Web you know will be based on the Web that knows you.”
That sentence jumped out at me while reading a post titled “The Future of Marketing” by Todd Defren on his great blog, PR Squared. It states simply — and memorably — what many Web 2.0 thought leaders have been suggesting about the future of the social Web.
Defren writes:
“When we surf and when we search, beyond the Social Network sites, we’re going to be taking our Friends with us; we’re taking our known online activities with us. Sites and search engines will re-orient themselves dynamically to match our identities. The entire Web experience will re-architect itself on-the-fly based on where we’ve been, what device we’re using, what we’ve looked at or purchased in the past, who we are friends with, what offers and content our contacts have been sharing and purchasing, etc.”
What does this mean for small businesses, organizations and professionals? We’ll avoid a protracted discussion of Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Open ID and what they all mean for the future of creating online identities. Read Defren’s full piece for his insights. My take:
First, it means businesses and professionals better be investing time in their social capital. Your business not on social media? The time is rapidly approaching when a company’s social identity online will far outweigh its Web site messages. Without a history of interacting with your customers online, your online identity will slip and customers will go elsewhere.
Second, it means targeted marketing will enter a whole new realm. How will companies reach specific audience segments? By trying to influence their influencers. Or, as Defren writes:
“We’ll become more sophisticated: we’ll be able to identify micro-influencers and influencers-of-influencers.”
In other words, as people increasingly turn to their friends and trusted online sources for recommendations on products or services, companies wanting to reach certain people will target . . . their friends and trusted online sources.
While we’re talking the near-future of marketing, it’s really a logical extension of what’s already happening in social networking. If you’re a professional trying to expand your reach, you can use LinkedIn or other social media to identify new leads and seek introductions through people you know.
Business has always been social, about connections with people. Business 2.0 is about using social media strategically to build digital connections, which in turn lead to personal relationships. And better business.
With apologies to Dale Carnegie, it’s no longer “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” In marketing, it’s becoming How to Influence People Through Their Friends.
Not using social media for your business? Talk to your pastor
I had the pleasure this week of speaking about social media to a distinguished group — a gathering of Atlanta area church pastors and their IT administrators.
What amazed me was how many people in the group had already been using social media to communicate with their members — and non–members. One pastor at a 17,000-plus-member church found the time to actively update his personal Facebook page. Another pastor talked about his church’s effort to live stream video of services and how they used a Facebook page to promote the video.
What was equally amazing was this group not only saw the value of social media, they wanted to keep on top of the latest, cutting-edge ways to engage with their members and attract new ones. They had lots of questions about how to optimize Facebook and Twitter, streaming video, mobile texting and improving their Web sites (yes, they all had sites, and they were quite good.)
One survey in April found 32 percent of “prominent” churches were using social media. Factoring in all churches, I would suspect the number would drop to around 1 in 5 churches. Which is probably similar to the percentage of small businesses actively using social media as a marketing tool.
A recent Citigroup survey of small businesses found that 76% of respondents didn’t believe using social media had helped them attract new leads or expand their companies in the past year. The survey also found that most don’t take advantage of social media for best practices on their businesses.
The obvious questions for those reporting no successes: Did they have a plan? Set goals? Talk to anyone in advance? Were they really active in using the tools? Did they just sell and not give anything in return?
While churches and small businesses are in different “businesses,” there are similarities in goals — communicating with members/customers, sharing information, offering services, expanding reach and more.
This diverse group of religious leaders got it. They talked of social media as a tool in their outreach efforts. I suspect word of mouth will encourage more adopters in the nation’s pulpits as the good works of churches and other religious institutions are spread across the social Web.
While the media is filled daily with stories on how businesses — big and small — have used social media successfully, somehow many small-business owners aren’t getting the message. This social media “thing” can work.
Perhaps they should talk to their pastor/priest/rabbi.
Age no excuse for business to avoid social media
When I talk with small-business people, many who are skeptical of social media — particularly Baby Boomers — often talk about how social sites are just meant for the young. And some say they think spending a lot of time online is unhealthy and antisocial.
I try to show them that people of all ages are adopters of social media. Facebook alone has had dramatic growth this year at nearly all age levels, none more pronounced than women over 50.
Now there are new numbers available on social media users. The median age of a Facebook user has now risen to 33, seven years older than in May 2008. That’s not far behind LinkedIn, the business networking site whose 50 million-plus users have a median age of 39. The median age of a Twitter user has dropped to 31, which shows that Generation Y, which was not an early adopter, is now turning to the microblogging service. There had been numerous articles earlier in the year that Gen Y thought Twitter was pointless. Apparently, that’s changing.
Facebook getting older? Twitter getting younger? What does this mean? It means the old adage is no longer true that only the young are the early adopters of technology. And new social sites designed to attract the young away from Facebook and Twitter are reportedly not having an impact. The young are willing to use the same social media now used by their parents.
So much for age creating a digital divide in social media. (Yes, MySpace remains decidedly young — a median age of 26 — but its focus has shifted to mostly music and entertainment. And it’s certainly not the dominant influence it once was.)
While we’re debunking myths, let’s burst another bubble. Remember the study which found people were becoming more socially isolated because of technology, especially mobile phones and the Internet? Not so fast, according to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew found that these technologies do not have a harmful social impact upon people.
In fact, Pew found social networking sites provide an outlet for “discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds.” In other words, people have digital contact with a more diverse group of people.
Boomer business owners, isn’t that one of your company goals? Don’t you want to expand your reach to new people, new contacts outside your regular sphere?
Can’t wait for the next business owner to bring up age, or dismiss the merits of social networking. I’ve got some new research to share.
Facebook features boon for small businesses
We gave Facebook credit yesterday for planning some changes that show an apparent savvy business strategy. Let’s take a closer look today at how those changes affect small businesses and their marketing efforts.
First, let’s be clear. I wasn’t anywhere near Facebook HQ when they recently shared their six-month product roadmap. I’m depending on trusted, reliable social media strategists, such as Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang (formerly of Forrester Research), for details. Second, some of the major Facebook changes will really be more suited to bigger companies with large budgets for marketing and developers who can create customized apps for them.
So let’s get that news out of the way. Developers creating Facebook apps will be able to ask Facebook users for their email addresses. And so companies who create such apps will have a whole bunch of potential new data to work with. They’ll be able to socialize their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with real contact information from social media and distinguish between existing customers and new prospects. So companies can further integrate their social media data into e-mail marketing.
But that’s the world of big-volume products and services. What do these changes mean for small businesses and professional service firms? And how should they be preparing for the changes?
As we wrote Wednesday, sites will be able to choose the types of Facebook functionality they want on their sites. For example, Facebook users can become “fans” of your Web site while visiting there. So that means their friends learn about your site from these new fans. A business can create a news stream visible on their site which would also appear on the Facebook pages of their fans — and also be visible to the fans’ friends.
If you have a small business that depends upon a Web site for business (and that’s a large percentage of them), you should:
• Be thinking about what Facebook features you’d like to have on your site.
• Be setting aside some money for your Webmaster to make sure you’re ready when it’s possible to integrate that functionality on your site
• Be thinking ahead on what types of creative ways you can interact with new users coming to your sites. Special deals? Coupons? What can you do to get users to come back to your site? And bring their friends with them?
• Be thinking about ways to harness the Facebook news stream. For example, if I want to promote this blog, I now use a Facebook page giving a short summary of what I’ve written and a link back to here. In 2010, I’ll be able to simply flag Facebook friends or site fans that my latest post is done. It’ll show up in their live feeds. Bloggers can expect increased comments because people are more likely to comment through Facebook functionality than traditional blog commenting. (I get far more comments about this blog through Facebook than I do here.)
So business sites with active updates and content will be in the best position to take advantage of the Facebook functionality. If you can share compelling content and helpful information with your site visitors, you can use the tools to drive more eyeballs and repeat visitors to your site.
Small businesses, this is a great opportunity. Facebook is bringing the social Web to you. Be prepared to take advantage of it.
