Social Media Stop Fighting it and Start Using it

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English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social Media is going to become increasingly important in everyone's lives whether we like it or not. As a business person that means you have to get to grips with it as a means of generating leads.

The reason I say this is not the usual 1 billion users on Facebook or 500 million on Twitter or the growth of LinkedIn or any of the other very many social networks. It's simply a question of demographics. That is the generation that was brought up on this stuff are now entering the workforce and will steadily occupy more senior decision making positions and they will use what they are familiar with to search for and validate suppliers. What immediately comes to mind to them is social media. 

This was brought into sharp focus by a story I heard recently. It's about three partners who each run their own retail outlets. One for men one for women and one for kids. They all bear the same family name although the stores are really separate. A local blogger had been to the children's store and had been unimpressed with the service they had received, and posted a blog about the experience. Other members of the community had posted comments agreeing with the sentiment. 

One of the younger members of staff in another shop had seen the posting and immediately made it known to their boss. His answer was well we run a different shop so its nothing to to with us and we work hard to give a personal service to all our customers. It wasn't until it was pointed out that whilst they the partners new how the shops were organised the public at large didn't. Since they all bore the family name in their title, people would naturally connect the three shops together, and that could lead to potential customers avoiding the other two shops because of bad reviews in the shop for children.

The next problem for the shop owner was that they had no social media foot print at all so it was not obvious how they could counter act these adverse comments. The solution to this problem, as I understand it, has not yet been found.

The issue that this raises is that the younger mums were much more connected to social media than the owner and it also illustrates the problem many older people face; that is because they were not on social media they had no idea that these comment were being made and so could do nothing about them. It also demonstrates that as our customers will get younger this type of interaction will become more common.

Google 貼牌冰箱（Google Refrigerator） (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

Also for the first time the likes of Google will come under pressure as the enormous amounts of information collected by the social media giants will be used to provide more relevant search results than a general search engine  like Google. That in turn means that these new customers will NOT be using Google to search for what they want. This isn't going to happen over night but it has already started. LinkedIn users can already search for skill sets companies and individuals within their site and recruitment companies are using it to great effect to validate potential candidates. Whilst they might search Google for other information their primary search is through LinkedIn.  It Wont be long before the other networks find a way to exploit their data. This means that having a web site that can be found using Google will no longer be enough, to get yourself found, you will have to be present on some or other social network.

More worryingly perhaps for the older generation is figuring out just how we interact with social media, what do we say how do we say it and which socials media platforms do we use to communicate. The rate of change in this market is still rapid but we learn to get to grips with it otherwise we are going to end up using marketing channels which just don't deliver.

In short we need to get our feet wet. Once you are in then you can educate yourself by watching others and learn how to exploit these channels. It's likely to involve some investment in training but that's a small price to pay to keep your business growing.       

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Businesses, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Social Networking How To Stop it Becoming a Time Sink

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Over the past 5 years, yes it's really that long, social media or social networking has moved from the fringes of marketing to centre stage. At the same time industry pundits are recommending that we engage with people across more and more platforms. Yesterday for example I was sent and an email entitled "the 9 must use social networks". 9! This is clearly getting out of hand, how am I going to do any work?

Now even a dinosaur like me recognises that I need to utilise this route to market but how can I  keep our social networking under control. We all know that the beauty of using social networks for marketing it is that it's free. The bad news is that using social networks for marketing is free. What do I mean by this? Because using social networks is free we tend to ignore one of the key measurements for successful marketing that of return on investment! All to often we become seduced by the fact that we can connect with all sorts of people without ever asking ourselves the key question what am I getting out of this effort. In this way social networking can easily become a time sink, where we are spending increasing numbers of hours without really looking at the returns.

If by contrast I send out a sales letter it's pretty easy to work out the leads from that mailing. The problem I have found, at least, for most businesses is that returns from social networking are a bit like wait for a bus, nothing much happens for a long time and then suddenly 3 turn up at once. 

Faced with this situation I wanted to come up with a few key questions I used  to help me and subsequently my clients work out how important the use of social networking might be as part of their marketing mix, and therefore how much time should be committed to social networking. The list is by no means exhaustive but it short at least help people get social networking into some sort of perspective, they are:-

1 What do I want to get from my social networking effort? More leads, more profile or more sales?

2 Are my prospects active on social networks? If not why bother?

3 Are my products/services something that is currently actively marketed through social networking? If not. Is there a good reason?

4 How widely spread are my potential customers. Does it matter that there's billion users on Facebook if my customers base is limited to 3 miles from where I live?

5 How much time can I reasonably spend on social networking? 30 mins  or 3 hrs a day?

6 Do I understand enough about social networking to use it effectively, if not, do I have the desire to learn through training?

7 Which social networking platform is best suited to my needs?

8 Do I understand that using social networking is for life. Not just for Christmas.

So what do I use?

Twitter daily, LinkedIn daily, Blogging twice monthly, Email marketing twice monthly and a bit of Facebook but mostly social stuff, it is meant to be social networking after all.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Survey: How Much Time We Spend Social Networking Each Week

This survey has been taken from visitors to my blog and shows just how much we've become attached to social networking. Of the respondents a third spend less than 5 hrs a week social networking with 14% spending over 20 hrs a week thats between 3 and 4 hrs a Day depending on whether you spread it over 5 or 7 days. Thats a lot of commitment!

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.

What social networking sites other than Twitter do you use the most?

Given the rapidly changing landscape with social networks I set up a polls to ask the Twitter community a simple question. What social networking sites other than Twitter do they use the most?

The results largely predictable do show a couple of interesting trends. It is no surprise that Facebook is the favourite alternative to Twitter, but what I wasn't expecting was how close Linked In came in as a second, a mere 6 percentage points behind. Given the relative size of the respective networks I was expecting Facebook to be way out in front.

The other surprise was the performance of Ecademy, it can in a creditable third; given that it has a tiny membership compared with the other two. Having said that I do need to accept that the results must be skewed by the composition of my network on Twitter, which is primarily business as opposed to social contacts. Despite this Ecademy's position is still quite a surprise. The other alternatives make up the remaining 10%, a relatively small percentage. Suggesting that there is more stability in the social networking world than we may first have thought.

Are Social Media Businesses Viable?

My thoughts recently have been about the business model for many if not most of the major Social Media infrastructure sites around today. The question I have been asking myself is, how will Social Networking sites make money?

This is a serious issue, and the current hype over Social Media sites, reminds me greatly of the situation in the middle of the Dot Com boom, when everyone was so carried away with the idea of Internet based business that they forgot the basics of business, that is there must be a way of making money out of the business otherwise it Will eventually fail.

Parallels are everywhere, Twitter the current doyen of social networking sites, not only does not make any income; but further there is no facility in its current business model to make any money. Twitter, according to recent comment raised nearly $100m on top of the $35m raised in February, yet it still has no way of generating any income. The question we ask is what happens to investor sentiment when its astronomical growth figures inevitably slow: recent reports, in the USA at least, suggest this may be happening now.

Similarly Bit.ly the default url shortner for Twitter has no method of generating income neither has budurl or tiny. These are key infrastructure players in the social media landscape yet they have no workable business model. Further there is a host of apps for the likes of Twitter and Facebook which are free. I find it rather disconcerting to think that much of the infrastructure platforms that underpin Social Networking don't have a viable business model. It's also somewhat ironic to think that those same platforms are filled with users propounding the benefits of monetising social networking and exhorting who ever will listen to do the same.

Once they hype cools and sentiment becomes more cautious, or realistic depending on your viewpoint, then investors will be looking for a quick return i.e. a trade sale, failing that, they'll curtail and then stop further investment as the prospect of a reasonable returns diminish. The worrying aspect to this is two fold firstly, who exactly will buy them: I cant see Facebook, the only Social Network business with the muscle to pay the prices that are likely to be demanded, going on a spending spree, it doesn't need too. Google could of course, but currently seems to have its attentions elsewhere and its previous foray into Social Media with Orkut was a dismal failure. So wherelse are the buyers? The omens aren't good; outside of the industry no purchase of a large scale social media business has been successful. One thinks of Fox's purchase of Myspace and ITV's purchase of Friends Reunited as classic examples.

Secondly, any difficulty in getting further funding could lead to radical shifts in service and costs for participation as survival takes precedent over funding. This could mean either a wall of advertising, or subscription; neither model is frankly appealing. You need a lot of advertising to payback about $150million and support the infrastructure and make ongoing profits. Subscription would stop growth dead, since buyers wouldn't want to pay to talk to potential sellers, when everywhere else it's free

The warning is therefore not to take "free Social Networking" as a given; there is a real possibility that one of its key benefits "that it is free at the point of sale" may become a thing of the past.

ExigentConsulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business.We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.

How We Use Twitter

Following a number of comments recently about how we or others use Twitter I set up a simple poll asking four questions. Do you use twitter for Purely Business, Purely Social, Mainly Business or Mainly Social. This is how you answered:

Not surprisingly it seams that half of us use it mostly as a business tool, whats interesting I think is that that it is only 50%. The hype around twitter would suggest more. 5% of us use it purely for business which is significantly larger than some commentators have suggested and 32% use it as a purely social network.  Admitedly the sample was small only 120 participants. However I intend to run the same poll next year to see how we might have changed our usage patterns.

I look forward to your comments

Can Twitter work for the Smaller Business?

When I started using Twitter I had two objectives. One was to see how Twitter functions as a social media marketplace and the other was to get a sense of how smaller businesses could use it as a channel to market.

Despite the hype around it Twitter still seems to me to be a niche product. That is based on the composition of its members. It reminds me of all those speed networking events that were so popular, their limiting factor was that it was predominantly sellers who attended and what we really need is buyers. I don't pretend to suggest that Twitter will die out as speed networking has but it does suffer from this phenomenon of too many sellers.

There are some areas where Twitter is well suited. The B2C environment for one, and there is certainly anecdotal evidence that companies have generated real revenue from Twitter and those providing digital products have found it a regular source of new business. It is however fair to say that this is not a quick win, it does take time and effort to build up a reputation and presence on Twitter. Mostly however its time; for those who are involved in delivering digital services, this is not an issue since using online environments is their natural marketplace. For those offering physical products and services it's a more challenging environment. However, if you're selling into the B2B or SoHo markets then it can still be an effective route. Essentially the fact that you can readily communicate with the decision maker and that the sales process is simple and short means that using Social Media Marketing (SMM) works well and having good visibility on twitter will certainly generate interest.

At the other end of the scale major corporates' have the time and resources to dedicate the man hours necessary to regularly insert their message and build that vital link of trust with their customers and prospects. So you can see many of the worlds largest businesses using Twitter including, Dell, Ford, etc. Dells assertion that it obtained $1million in revenue from Twitter has been well publicised. We must however accept that larger businesses already have an advantage since they've built a level of "trust" around their brand long before Twitter came along and they leverage that advantage further now.

One should not forget also that Twitter is more attractive to business because postings are necessarily short and unlike Facebook, You Tube or MySpace is text based. Interestingly this will make it more readily adopted by the professional in a higher age group and therefore more suited to today's decision makers.

The more difficult question is how "Fred Bloggs of Bloggs Joinery" can use Twitter. B2B business is not necessarily well suited to Twitter and many owner managers don't have the time to devote to develop a network, and quality is still as important as quantity. This is ignoring the import question of whether they "get Twitter" which is likely to be a major hurdle in itself. I have spoken to a number of small business owners who just don't "get it" and have subsequently stopped using it before they really had a chance see what it could do for them. So what options are open to them, well firstly assuming there is sufficient marketplace on Twitter for their product (something that is seriously open to question), they could encourage all their staff to join Twitter and use a collection of voices to build up a following or secondly, outsource. This may seem an extreme step or even heresy in Social Marketing, but to me it's an inevitable consequence of how social marketing works. SMM agencies will naturally develop enormous power simply by having several clients each with several users promoting several products. With that infrastructure its becomes almost inevitable that they would harness all the voices from all the clients to cross promote each new product growing in power and effect each time they add new clients. The next logical step is to dispense with real voices and create surrogate voices after all it's relatively easy to create persona's which people can use as templates. If true it would completely undermine the concept of Social Media Marketing as we know it.

These are surprisingly radical conclusions but supported, I think, by strong logic. I dont presume to know that this is true and I'm looking to you to tell me what do you think? Let me have your thoughts.

Laurence Ainsworth www.exigent-uk.com

Latest Social Network Rankings – Worrying Times for MySpace

Compete.com has just released its traffic survey on social networking sites. The biggest climber by far is Twitter shooting up from 22^nd in 2008 to 3^rd in 2009. Interestingly the biggest looser is Bebo.com dropping 9 places to 14^th.

Myspace continues to exhibit a decline having hit a peak in 2007 and fallen 1% in 2008 and a further 13% in 2009. This must be a worrying trend for its owners and suggests, despite its obvious popularity, that it is somehow not meeting the needs of the new internet generation. It may be that it is a victim of its own success and that it has never quite managed to capture the imagination of users outside of the US. This is supported the fact that Facebooks' growth is now almost exclusively driven by users outside the US and its US subscriber numbers has also stagnated. Perhaps more worryingly for MySpace, is its drop in marketshare as a percentage of the top 25 social networking sites from 61% in 2007 to 33% in 2008, which perfectly illustrates that it hasn't enjoyed any of the 61% growth in traffic for the top 25 as a whole.

It clear that MySpace is in a difficult position, and if it doesn't to something soon it will find its position further eroded as other sites enjoy continued growth at its expense.

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