Social Media Stop Fighting it and Start Using it

  If you haven't been to my blog before you might want to subscribe to my feed

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. 

Tweet

Social Networking How To Stop it Becoming a Time Sink

  If You Haven't been to my blog before you might want to subscribe to my feed

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. 

Tweet