Yostivanich

Recently I’m hav­ing the chance to view how a busi­ness works with social net­works and social media. So I wanted to dis­cuss some of the lessons that I am learn­ing in this expe­ri­ence and what exactly are some of the ways a busi­ness can use social net­works to help themselves.

The main goal of a social net­work almost seems to dis­al­low busi­ness from inter­act­ing on the sites. This is because social net­works pro­mote open­ness that doesn’t come nat­u­rally to many busi­ness. Also a social net­work or social media isn’t designed around the sell­ing of a prod­uct beyond your­self. How­ever if you sub­sti­tute your busi­ness for a per­son, social sites can become an impor­tant tool for your business.

If you make the goal not so much to sell prod­ucts or ser­vices but rather to engage your cus­tomers in your brand that can be an effec­tive tool. The rea­son is that cus­tomers can actively pro­mot­ing your brand by iden­ti­fy­ing with the brand and therein the brand gets free adver­tis­ing to their friends.

Social media is a scary for many busi­ness, the idea of both who knows if you could actu­ally make any money off these prod­ucts or that con­ver­sa­tions could develop that you both have no con­trol over and are highly neg­a­tive and critical.

Two responses to that: One while busi­ness should engage in Cost Ben­e­fit Analy­sis, Social Media is a pos­i­tive for one rea­son, free adver­tis­ing. That is essen­tially what a social media strat­egy allows you to have as a small to medium scale com­pany. As you gain in size and adver­tis­ing becomes less nec­es­sary, essen­tially when you become a house­hold name on the scale of Apple or Coca-Cola, social medial allows you to be viewed as open and hon­est with your cus­tomers. This leads into the sec­ond response, that social media while you might have neg­a­tive con­ver­sa­tions about your prod­uct, those con­ver­sa­tions allow you to receive direct and hon­est feed­back from your cus­tomers. A busi­ness should be always focused on the cus­tomer and their expe­ri­ence, if your cus­tomers are unhappy, they won’t use or buy your prod­uct. Social medial allows you to directly hear those responses, much eas­ier and in more effec­tive ways that say a cus­tomer sur­vey can. The main rea­son for this is that a sur­vey is viewed as first off very stilted and con­trolled by the com­pany, sec­ond writ­ing a com­ment on a com­pany blog is viewed in the direct oppo­site light and also feels eas­ier to the consumer.

Not every­thing in social media will be an direct break even point, it will appear that you lose money on the strat­egy. The rea­son for this is that you may not be able to tell which of your cus­tomers come from social media sites or use your prod­uct because a friend does so. But I would sug­gest you give a try and see what hap­pens you might be surprised.

Related Notes:

This is why I dis­agree with the idea of putting ads on your per­sonal blog, the blog is a pro­mot­ing your­self as a per­son. Unless the ads are used only in a man­ner to pay for over­head of the blog, ie. host­ing costs. Also that is why I don’t think com­pa­nies should charge for an RSS feed. True peo­ple may not visit your site, but they are more likely to keep your com­pany fresh in their mind when as changes occur on your site they hear about it. Rather than if you had to visit a site every day. I would not be inter­act­ing with as many sites as I do if I wasn’t sub­scribed to their RSS feed. It would be way too much work and effort to con­tin­u­ally check in with some sites, espe­cially those that don’t update on a very reg­u­lar sched­ule (Jonathan Schwartz at Sun) or update con­stantly (TechCrunch or Boing­Bo­ing).