How your business is disadvantaged due to Social Media and how to prepare for it.

1: The Power Of Social Communication Can Ruin Your Reputation

A single bad review on prominent social channels, can trigger a wildfire scaring your potential customers. Amazingly, even activities you do using traditional media, such as an advertisement using traditional media can trigger social tsunamis(Summer’s Eve Advertisement).

You need a crisis management system in place, not that it replaces your traditional crisis management processes, however, you need to be able to use both traditional and social channels to manage the crisis.

Moreover, getting people to pay attention to your messages using traditional or social media is challenging as there is just too much information out there.

Power Shift: With Social Media your business messages can get easily morphed and diluted as now people have the power to instantly communicate and share across multiple platforms.

GET BACK CONTROL

If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself -  (Source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War)

Make your weakness your strengths. First audit your social initiatives, Next the competition.

Audit Social Media and Community Channels, with reference to your business. Make listening your top priority. View this 7 minute video to learn how(Social Media and Business Intelligence). Note if you’re new to Social Media and Communities View this five minute video first(How community and social media changed corporate communication). More importantly do an audit of what your competitors are doing using Social Media.

2: The Social Media Myth–Build Relationships With Customers Easily

It’s quite common to find advise online, which touts social media as a great enabler to built relationships with customers easily, and that it is one of the most important opportunities.

However, for most organizations, it is difficult for your customer support or marketing, or product personnel to reach out to, and respond across all the various social channels. Imagining that, while doing the above they’ll be able to build real relationships with customers is a pipe dream. Additionally, using only online channels, misses out completely the offline physical world interactions between people.

Break the cost barrier, of hiring additional people, to engage and support your customers.
Prioritize Relationships with Maximum Impact: Embrace your advocates and community.

Communities and advocates, champions and influencers, can help increase your reach to a far larger audience, than your budget constrained teams. Communities and advocates are held by a common cause, passion. They are frequently helping and supporting each other. Advocates and influencers are not only your key promoters, they can be your first line of defence in this growing space with new channels and new people joining these social channels.

Note: I’m not saying ignore your customers, however, face reality and prioritize. Embrace your most passionate customers first, after that, use your resources for connecting with all your customers.

3: Social Media is Primarily a Marketing Tool. Really? 

This is unfortunately a myth which has bogged this industry since its birth. It is sadly a perception issue. Additionally, your internal marketing teams themselves might want to own social media from a company perspective which is downright foolish.

To illustrate this, just imagine, if Internet access were only available to your marketing team, or imagine the telephone is available only to marketing personnel. Actually this isn’t too far from the truth. The telephone at one point of time was a luxury item, with limited people having access to it. It seems we’re not great at learning from our own history.

It’s not entirely the marketing teams fault, but it is a management issue, as leaders have still not understood the true value they can gain by leveraging Social Media across the entire organization. Most organizations aren’t really setup to leverage this opportunity, and hence I think it’s a bigger threat, than an advantage, unless you’re ready to do the work.

START WITHIN…

If you want to reap the benefits of social media, you need to leverage social media across business functions. Whether it’s customer support, research or even production. For e.g. you can gather inputs for product teams via reviews and opinions, feedback and suggestions. Similarly each department can benefit. You need to have a well defined internal structure to really leverage social media.

YOU NEED TO CIRCLE THE WAGONS

Get everyone on board, create systems to enable, internal communication, collaboration and processes to leverage the inputs. Read about how to Leverage Social Intelligence within your Business and how to Map Existing Business Functions to Social Media (pdf file).

4: Content is King. More the Merrier. Really?

After painting 900 pictures and about 1,100 drawings and sketches, his 2,000 pieces of art were never really discovered until after his death – Do you know who this brilliant artist was?

I’m talking about Vincent van Gogh. Today, van Gogh’s work is worth millions of dollars. His painting Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for 82.5 million dollars in 1990 and is valued at 134 million today.…  and here’s a list of 10 people who produced great content, but became really famous after death, which I’ve quoted from.

Though some people would probably look at being preserved in posterity in history books as a good thing, in business we want people, to get to us today. And Social media adds to the challenge of making sure your content is visible to the correct audience.

You not only need a great content strategy, but also great strategies for marketing your content, so that your specific target audience gets to know about you not only from you, but from other third party sources as well.

This is not a new challenge, you did the same with PR and advertising in newspapers, magazines, T.V. and Radio. Now you need to learn about additional constraints such as 140 characters on Twitter, or engaging on Social Media channels like FB, Google+ etc. Additionally, you need to learn about enabling easy sharing,  SEO, etc.. Moreover you need to make sure that all teams within your organization are able to produce and share relevant content.

(For some reasons SEO has a bad name, but surprisingly nobody said that, placement of your advt. in a store at a certain location, or crafting creative lines of copy to grab attention, or the way your brochure is designed, or even advertorial content is bad. However, you might want to read more about it at Wikipedia)

5: Likes, Followers, Re-Tweets… Oooh, aah & Ouch…Where’s the ROI

The business of corporate business is only two things – Either an Increase in Revenue/Profits or a Reduction in Costs Mixing this up with Likes, Followers, Re-Tweets is a mistake as these don’t directly map to ROI. In fact most marketing and business folks loose track of these, due to the shiny newness of Social Media tools, websites and new channels which are still coming up.

Focus on the ROI – Read this to Clarify the Business Objective

Ok, now what?

You’ve read up till here, and I’m guessing you’ve agreed with the key points, what do you do now? Unlike others we’re not going to ask you to call us yet…

1. Here’s what we suggest, first do an audit of your social media initiatives. It may not be all encompassing, but you need to get your hands dirty first.

2. Once you’ve done that, share the new found knowledge and insights with your team members.

3. Next, based on the knowledge you’ve gained, define your business objectives, plan the team structure, workflow, processes and strategies on how you’re going to leverage social media.

4. Yeah, around the third step is probably the right time you should call us , but we’re happy to help you at each stage. Drop us an email, we don’t charge you for responding to your mail, nor do we bite