Why companies should explore social media, in a nutshell.
Versions of this question are cropping up more often in my work: “What’s the basic argument for companies getting involved in social media?” As it’s been posed to me, the question is usually about the main social-media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook. So here are my top two answers.
1. It puts you close to your customers. Yes, in the longer run you will want to calculate the ROI of, say, running a Twitter account, using some metric that reflects both its marketing and customer-support facets. But in the first instance, it’s less about ROI and more about talking to your customers — learning from them, improving things for them, satisfying them.
The effect of this is compounded by (a) the more emotive, less guarded conversations you tend to find in the social media, and (b) the fact that you can converse just as easily with your critics or curious onlookers as you can with existing customers.
2. People are already out there, talking about you anyway. Maybe you don’t care about being buddy-buddy with your customers, or maybe you believe you’re already in touch with them well enough. Even then, unless you’re dealing in big-iron enterprise goods, it’s likely that somebody on Twitter or LinkedIn or a blog or a forum is talking about your company, your products, your competitors, your industry, your customers, or your customers’ customers.
Knowledge is power, and you should think long and hard before you opt out of tracking those conversations. Whether you participate in them is another question, although if you do take part with just a little bit of savvy, you can help shape those conversations in ways that P.R., advertising, or marketing never could.
THAT’s my simple, two-point argument for why companies should be involved in social media. What have I missed?
~
Image by maliciousmonkey, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Category: Social mediaIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
16 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
I think it’s important to note that social media isn’t a tight fit for every company, and that the tools of social media as they stand right now, for example, Twitter, might not be right for every business.
As SM platforms evolve, there will be endless opportunities for companies to become more involved. In the interim, keeping open minds about having two-way conversations and utilizing existing tools in ways that add value and not simply broadcast, are the general rules of thumb.
Tim, I am not sure I find many conversation about my company FG SQUARED on Twitter, etc… no matter how hard I look. Please prove me wrong. I’m sure I’m not alone. What I am mostly interested in doing is adding our name to the conversation. And of course, connecting with those friends of mine who use these tools.
Good points, Liz — and it does get tiresome to hear socia-media true believers say that EVERY company MUST be on Twitter. Many companies, especially those in the expensive/exclusive end of enterprise sales, would find it a waste of time.
Still, they could set up a few Twitter searches, plug them into RSS feeds, and then passively monitor the few mentions of their companies that *do* come up. Doesn’t imply that they should even have a corporate Twitter account, but they can at least make themselves aware of what’s going on.
Tim, I think it also puts you closer with members of your trade press. They are constantly under deadline to create relevant stories to tell. As they connect directly with a company’s experts through Twitter, FriendFeed and other social media applications, they learn about these folks and their areas of expertise and get to know them well enough to contact directly.
Ah, Steve, your comment and mine just crossed the wires at the same time.
In the case of your company, the conversations might be more about the market in which you operate. That is, you might set up searches to track key phrases relevant to you and your customers, and to track mentions of your competitors.
This isn’t an encouragement for you to be more involved (or less involved) with Twitter. It’s about using the tools available to harvest competitive/market intelligence that you can use to make better-informed decisions — including better-informed decisions about how, where, and how much you should involve your company in social media.
To take another angle, I don’t think there’s anything *for* me to prove here.
Good point, Jim. Probably I should amend the post to say “talking with your AUDIENCES” — of which the trade press is an important example. Twitter, FriendFeed, and other outlets make it easier to develop less-formal relationships with journalists, analysts, scholars, opinion-makers, and other influencers. For many companies, the value of that is worth pursuing, whether or not using the same social media outlets wins them customers directly.
It is important to note that “explor[ing] social media” does not mean you automatically have a Twitter account, Facebook page and blog. Exploring can simply mean monitoring, if that is all your organization does. Every PR person should monitor social media outlets for their clients; however, that doesn’t mean I have a Twitter account for each one. That becomes a question of whether you need to monitor the conversation or join it.
Absolutely right, Melanie — and you’ve put more clearly what I was trying to say in my post and in my earlier comments. For plenty of companies and in plenty of contexts, the right answer will be to use Twitter (and forums, and blog searches, and so on) as a listening post to FIND OUT what people are saying about them. Whether that company should then USE Twitter (etc.) as a vehicle for communication in the other direction is a separate question.
Your question was focused on businesses, but I’ve often gotten the same one from individuals and I think the response is not that dissimilar.
Basically, I turn it around and ask them what it is they want to accomplish and then we talk about which social media tools might help them accomplish their goal.
Too often businesses and people get enamored with the tools and run around creating wikis and blogs and facebook pages without thought to what they hope to accomplish with them.
Tim, you’ve done a good job of boiling why SM for brands down to two key elements — connect and listen (in ways that aren’t possible via traditional marketing). I would add two more.
Give: social marketing gives businesses the opportunity to give freely to their customers with interesting and useful content, special promotions, and authentic dialogs that can’t typically happen on a mass-media scale. We’ve seen real numbers that show that giving first, in the context of connecting and listening, allows a brand to eventually get to the holy grail of relationships with consumers (and my other addition).
Get: When a brand takes the time to offer a connection and something of value to customers through a personalized interaction, they can, over time, earn the right to ask for something in return that the customer is happy to give. That something might be market research, insight into the customer’s needs, loyalty, willingness to recommend, or even a product purchase. Of course to make it to “get” the brand has to put real effort into the first three, but what they get in return is typically of higher value and often lower overall cost than what they would get via a traditional marketing campaign.
Laura — I like your simple approach, which comports with my views on “naive questions” and why they’re so useful. “What do you want to accomplish with social media?” is a great, simple question that anyone should answer before they invest heavily in Twitter, Facebook, or another online community.
Natanya — As I said in my tweet earlier, you offer a *great* extension on my post. Good, good stuff.
Is aesy to gorget that people participating in this conversation belong to a tinny demographic that is very prolific and with an unusual insight and education. How can a company select an employee to follow the social networks, what kind of network and taste in social mores? We have departed the homogeneous landscape. The web is a great tool for wisdom or folly.
[...] Why companies should explore social media, in a nutshell. [...]
This is a great – it is that simple – connections, and conversations where you truly listen. I love the idea of companies following or monitoring what is being said about their product or brand to provide meaniningful data for decision making. What a great way to put your toe in the water, before you decide to jump in. In the end, if you decide to not jump in based on that data, you know why you chose not to.
[...] your business is still considering using Twitter, read this quick blog post by Tim Walker on why you should give it a shot. Tim and Adam Hanin also post on Twitter using the [...]
[...] Why companies should explore social media, in a nutshell. [...]