......as fear is weakness
The vast interest in social media belies an anxiety about how to use it and how to put it to the best advantage. The signs of this anxiety are everywhere. The social media blog Mashable, which is one of the most visited blogs with 12-million page views per month, has a how-to section that frequently attracts responses in the thousands to each post. Also, websites like TechCrunch, Demo Pit, and Killer Startups are continually posting about new social media tools and how to use them.
"There`s a huge amount of stress [in marketing departments about] `are we missing the hot new thing,`" says Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. "That stress causes companies to panic about social media and not invest their time wisely."
So how can you invigorate your company`s social media presence in a environment that`s constantly pushing the cutting edge? The rule for whether you should be dabbling in a social space is pretty simple. "Most companies want to have a presence wherever their customers are," says Gina Bianchini, CEO of the Palo Alto, California-based social platform Ning. "So if a company has customers congregating on social media platforms, it`s a good idea for that company to know how and when to interact with their customers" on each platform.
Sernovitz says that companies should think of themselves not as pioneers of a new technology but as "fast followers," dipping their toe in a particular social media body of water once it`s clear they`re being discussed in that space.
But some companies buck the conventional wisdom that you should join a conversation going on about your company. It`s like "not being invited to a party but showing up with a gift; it doesn`t make it any better," says Mark Ghuneim, CEO of Trendrr, a company that allows its clients to track what people are saying about their brand across social and traditional media alike.
Ghuneim believes companies should break the information they want to share about themselves into manageable, shareable bits. This allows their brand advocates and loyal customers to do the work autonomously. Citing an example of how easy sharing can do wonders for a company, Ghuneim says, "if YouTube didn`t have a technological feature called embed, 50 percent of their audience probably wouldn`t have been there."
But even though it is less expensive than other forms of marketing, social media`s profitability for your company depends on what you expect from it. "Most companies put it in the wrong spreadsheet," says Sernovitz. You can`t think of it as a marketing tool because "it`s not a sales channel and it`s not going to add up with proper ROI numbers."
But what if we assume that an incoming customer service phone call costs you $25. If you can answer a customer`s question on a company blog or Twitter account, Sernovitz estimates it could save a small company 100 phone calls in the course of a year. As a customer service tool, he says, social media is "incredibly effective and efficient."
Source:
http://www.inc.com//news/articles/2009/10/social-media.html
