In my consulting assignments and workshop on social media, participants ask me the same question again and again. The top three questions are –
- “Why do we as a business need to be there?”
- “Facebook is for friends and Twitter is there for celebrities, not for real businesses”.
- “We are a professional organization, not some startup”
In this two part series, I will share how social media can change the business dynamics and help you get closer to your prospects and customers. In part 2 of this series I will share my own personal example with an airline and a bank on how they leveraged social media to solve customer problems.
Well are businesses really social?
A few years ago when Avinash Kaushik, an Analytics Evangelist of Google quipped “social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better”, it seemed like just that.
Now 3 years later 36 months wiser, Wikipedia defines thus – “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue”,
Why should I care, you may ask?
Well, I can give you not one but six trends that possibly can change your perspective.
- Because 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology.
- Because 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks.
- Because visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity
- Because time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate, accounting for
- Because social media is democratizing communications. Big time.
- Because social media is like word of mouth on steroids.
Because, social media is a force to be reckoned with! If facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populated in the world, just after China and India.
If all this is great stuff, how does it affect my business, my customers or my prospects? I will cover these in my next issue, and I leave you with this thought –
- 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media.
- 93% of these users want a dialogue, not a monologue on social media and believe that companies should not treat social media as yet another channel for broadcasting bulls*t.
Well now that I set the grounding on the basics of Social Media, I will take up in my next issue on how businesses can leverage social media in my next issue.
