Your business and social media/networking… yes or no?

Social Media and Social Networking are all the rage. There are social media experts on the radio, on TV and calling you on the phone daily now.But what does it all mean and should your business be using FaceBook, Twitter, Blogs, Wikis and all the rest? In This post we’ll give a quick introduction to the area as we are talking to lots of people about it at the moment and we worry that people are being “taken for a ride”.

Social Media and Social Networking is terrific! Lance Wicks our managing director loves it so much he has given keynote lectures at University of Bath on the importance it plays in the future of sport and coaching of sport.

The photo to the left is from a social media website (www.flickr.com) and this site is a “blog” and is part of the mass of social media on the internet. We use Flickr, Twitter, FaceBok, YouTube and many more. We are also helping develop social networks in the sporting world and http://martialconversations.com is the latest project we have worked on in the area of social media and social networking. The benefits to your business or organisation are potentially huge!

But should your business use social media or social networking?

It really depends on your business is the truth of the matter. There are a myriad of social media and a myriad of use cases and benefits. There are also a myriad of pitfalls and hidden costs.

So how do you decide if your business should use social media?

Our first question when people discuss this with us is this: “Do you use social media/social networking yourselves?“ If the answer to this question is not “YES“, then using it for your business is in our opinion a risky decision. As with any “social” situation or environment, social media has conventions and etiquette and risks.

The second question we normally ask is “What social media/social networking sites do your customers use now?“ if the answer is none, or you don’t know the answer, we would again suggest that social media is not for you.

If you are selling to a group of customers that don’t use FaceBook, then FaceBook is not a tool you should use. If they are all on Bebo, then maybe you should be there. If they are on Twitter, you should perhaps be on Twitter. Maybe your videos should be on YouTube (our demonstration videos are hosted via social media sites like Vimeo, Blip.tv and YouTube for example).

We know a sports coach that is promoting his services via Facebook and promoting his classes to close on 30,000 people and having great success. We also know of sporting national governing bodies who have attempted to use social media and failed. There is also the sadly increasingly common situation where businesses are making social blunders with their use of social networking and social media websites. Twitter seems to be a place where mistakes are being made quite a bit at the moment.

Mars, for example tried something interesting and had mixed results. They turned the home page for their M&M product into a page that showed every mention of M&Ms on Twitter. Which was pretty cool to start with, but then people started to mention M&Ms in a bad and often obscene ways and Mars page started to look bad for the brand. It was quickly altered.

The mistake here was to forget that they have no control over social media. They could not filter the content and they (somehow) didn’t consider the possibility that people would find it amusing to put swear words on a major brands website without breaking any laws; simply via a tweet message.

The opposite would be organisations like Zappos, who use Twitter in a different way. They have real people within the business use twitter, watching for mentions of the company and interacting with the public. An example is a UK based person tweeted “do Zappos deliver to the UK?” and a Zappos representative replied back (to the soon to be customer’s suprise) “yes we do… visit www.zappos.com, when you order you’ll be able to put a UK address no problem”.

If you are going to use social media the lesson is that you need to see it as an opportunity to interact with your customers, not to sell to them or be clever. You need to use the medium and understand how and why people use it. Facebook are stuggling with this as are many businesses on many sites.

How to get started with social media?

We would recommend that you should start by creating accounts and “lurking” as a start. For example signup to twitter and start following people in your industry, don’t start posting twitter messages right away. Just listen in and learn how people communicate on twitter. You might also want to try searching for your company name or product names and see if people are talking about you. If they are, join in… carefully.

Of course we would also recommend speaking with someone like ourselves and getting some advice on how to proceed.