Why use Social Media?
Posted by Arjun ThomasThis topic is a little off the project management track but given that more companies seem to be adopting web 2.0 solutions as well as leveraging social media to promote products and services I thought I’d put some of my thoughts down and hopefully start a discussion around this subject. Given that a number of you might have experienced its adoption within your organizations it would be interesting to hear your stories and thoughts.
The big question. Why use Social Media?
If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.
There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.
- Reach out to existing customers
- Tap into new customers
- Promote your brand
- Recruit new talent
- Be “Cool”
While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now. Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.
Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.
Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.
Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.
Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .
Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left behind.
Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )
The most popular of these are of course:
- Blogs
- Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
- Collaboration tools (wiki’s )
- Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
- Podcasts
What makes this worth investing in?
- Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
- Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
- Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
- Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
- Recency : One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
- Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.
Advantages
The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.
It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )
There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.
Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.
These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.
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einehc says:
Thanks for giving me an idea on social media. Very helpful! Let me share an article regarding this.
http://www.articletechie.com/The-Early-Bird-Gets-the-Marketing-Worm/a12780_1
Priyanka D says:
At DeskAway we are active on twitter, facebook.. it has good traction. The reasons you have listed are why we are on these social platforms.
Recently we started a campaign for how other smbs are using social media to help them with their work. We are profiling the interesting ones on our blog…
http://www.deskaway.com/blog/2009/07/21/we-want-to-publish-your-social-media-story/
Arjun Thomas says:
Priyanka,
It’s great to hear that DeskAway is keen to pickup on success stories at other organizations. The small and medium businesses seem to be catching on to the benefits of this medium a lot faster than their larger counterparts and this might have a lot to do with their flexibility and customer focus through new age platforms.
I’ve worked with a number of larger organization’s who’ve only recently started understanding the benefits of a technology like this. The progress is slow but encouraging.
Arjun.
Daria says:
Arjun,
This is a great post. It would be really great, if you could address the use of social media in project management. For example, a few months ago there was a buzz about using Facebook for project management. Do you think this social network can be useful for actually managing a project?
Arjun Thomas says:
Honestly speaking I’m not really sure how well social networks can be used to create project management solutions given the level of structure and process that is necessary.
However it does address a lot of the communication issues that tend to plague a number of the older PM solutions.
New products in the project management space have started integrating web 2.0 ( including social networking ) features in an attempt to bridge this gap.
That said it would be interesting to see someone attempt to use a platform like Facebook to manage projects.