 No, we didn't forget blogs, and, yes, blogs are social media as well. But for the purpose of this article, we're going to assume you understand that blogs represent one of the least expensive and best ways to have a conversation with your customers, your employees, and your vendors.
But just when you've got the blogging thing down, along come new forms of media, and you have to ask yourself whether they're worth your time and money. The answer is yes, and here's why: social media is a less expensive, more targeted way to market, a fantastic tool for salespeople, an inexpensive way to do market research, a terrific way to stay in touch with your employees, and a relatively easy way to capture internal company knowledge.
If you need more convincing, try this:
- Dell has a Facebook page.
- JetBlue is on Twitter.
- The fastest growing age demographic on Facebook is 35-plus.
- The Consumer Internet Barometer (from nonprofit The Conference Board) reports that one out of four online households visit social network sites.
- Harvard is building a portal designed to connect its hospitals and research community (on his blog, CareGroup Health System CIO John Halamka called it Facebook meets eHarmony for the Harvard community).
And one more thing to think about. Although business networking sites like LinkedIn are easy to use and feel comfortably professional, the numbers just don't add up. A June 18 article in The Wall Street Journal reported that LinkedIn had 7.5 million unique visitors in April. Facebook had 116 million during the same period.
Jump right in
Just as in the early days of the Web, the only way to get started with social media is to jump in somewhere. You probably won't get it exactly right the first time, but it's unlikely to do any real harm.
Social media expert Chris Brogan says it's important to remember that platforms like Facebook or MySpace are about connecting with humans, not with businesses. "Don't make your Facebook profile about your company; make it about a human being who happens to work for a company," he advised.
Once your profile is set up, start learning about the community, listening to what others are saying, and adding friends. "Look at other people's profiles and groups, and see how the interactions are growing," said Brogan, publisher and senior analyst at Chrisbrogan.com. "Listening is so important, and it's the step that most people rush right by because they feel like they have a message they need to get out."
This begs the question of who will set up these profiles and monitor them. Brogan said it depends on the main goal of your social networking efforts. For example, if you're hoping to better understand what people think of your products and services, this effort could be led by a product manager or other marketer. But if your CEO is your company evangelist, it may make sense for he or she to take the lead on Facebook or MySpace (billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has a Facebook page, as does Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center).
Another option is to build a social group around an activity, rather than your company. Brogan calls this bank-shot marketing. "The trick is to find the third point of the triangle, the mutual interest between users and buyers. For example, if you have a Jeep, you probably don't want to hang out in a group and talk about your Jeep-but you may be interested in joining a group of off-road enthusiasts."
Both Brogan and David Evans, owner of consultancy Digicraft, recommend using widgets to drive people from your profile page to your main company Web site. For example, American Eagle Outfitters created a kissing booth widget that created a large following.
"It was fairly viral, and it had links back to the company. It was a people-replicated viral widget marketing that worked a lot better than those little ads in the bottom left-hand corner," said Brogan. (Not to mention that ads cost money and widgets cost little or nothing.)
"It could be as simple as a industry news feed that's relevant to your readers, but when they click on the widget, it drives them to the originating site. Businesses have missed the boat in taking advantage of this technology," added Evans.
Will it blend?
There's no question that YouTube and Twitter are more on the fringe than Facebook or MySpace when it comes to business. Still, Evans and Brogan have examples of successful business pursuits from each.
Brogan puts it colorfully, saying, "YouTube is not just dogs on skateboards any more." He points to commercial blender company Blendtec. "If you had told me a year ago that a company selling blenders would be interesting, I'd have said no. But Blendtec came up with the idea of putting weird things in the blender and asking: Will it blend?"
At first, it felt more like a prank site than anything else, but one day shortly after the iPhone was released, the company ground one up. "The nerds of the world let out a sigh," said Brogan. There were millions of views the first day, and the site took off to the point it now sells T-shirts and DVDs of the blender adventures. "It's causing companies to open their eyes and say, 'Whoa, is there anything we can do that funny or compelling with our product?'" said Brogan. Of course, there are potential pitfalls here: a company skit that amuses your employees may not be nearly as funny to the rest of the world.
He advises companies to be sure to put your company's URL in the video and says to watch for just-released interactive features on YouTube. For example, you might be watching a video and have a window pop up saying "If you want more information on this product, click here."
"YouTube serves up billions of videos a month now-it's becoming a destination site for finding video information, just like Google is where people go for search," Brogan said.
Twitter is a micro-mobile messaging platform that lets you send up to 140 characters from the Web, your cell phone, an instant-messaging client, or a third-party client. The idea is to answer the question "What are you doing?" but Brogan said the more interesting question to answer is "What has your attention?"
Communities are built on Twitter by choosing to "follow" certain users, receiving their "tweets" on your phone or computer. Brogan said Comcast, JetBlue, H&R Block, TurboTax, and Dell all monitor content that mentions their company name. In fact, a gentleman named Frank, based in Philadelphia, is the voice of Comcastcares on Twitter, answering customer service questions and facilitating fixes.
Similarly, if you were an ISP prospecting for customers, you could search the site for the phrase "my ISP sucks." "You could identify potential customers all day long," noted Brogan.
Evans pointed out that because it's a new channel, many businesses haven't planned out how to respond when someone maligns their brand on Twitter. "And we all know what happens when the wrong person in a company responds on a blog or to a reporter," he said, adding that having a response team in place is the best way to avoid this type of crisis.
Twitter also has the potential to help managers keep track of field personnel or allow employees in large companies to communicate internally. "It's a great way to let people know where you are, what your mood is, what you're working on, and where you could use some help," Brogan said.
Become a thought leader
Companies that are highly concerned about protecting their brand, have a large community of users, and/or have a particular reason people might want to participate in an online discussion should consider building their own social network rather than developing a group on MySpace or Facebook. One way to do this is using a vendor like Mzinga, which creates custom sites for customers like Hallmark and American Express.
Barry Libert, chairman, said he strongly believes that being social is the future of business. Mzinga CEO Rick Faulk agreed, saying the organizations he and Libert work with are being greatly affected by social networking. "Large organizations are changing how they go to market, how they conduct market research, how they connect customers with product managers, and how they handle customer support," he said.
Even knowledge management can get a boost from social media, said Faulk. Mzinga is working with a very large oil and gas company with a problem soon to affect many businesses: 30% of its workforce will be retiring in the next four years. "The company is deploying a social network to not allow that expertise to escape the business," Faulk said.
The folks at Environmental Data Resources in Milford, Conn. are less concerned with retirements than raising the level of expertise in their industry. The company had for many years considered launching an online community, and, when Jay Gaines joined the company three and a half years ago as vice president of marketing, his expertise in the area helped jumpstart the project.
EDR gathers and creates environmental risk information from a number of sources such as government databases and historical sources to help environmental professionals assess the risk that a property may be contaminated. The initial idea of the community, said Gaines, was to help those professionals connect with one another and debate industry topics while building customer loyalty and positioning EDR as a thought leader.
Gaines said the executives at Mzinga helped he and his team think about the project more strategically. "As we talked with Mzinga, we realized this could be a platform to address key challenges that we as a company, and the industry as a whole, face," he said. "We realized we could turn this community into a place where anyone who is qualified can improve on the information we provide and they need so critically."
The site has only been up for a couple of months, but it already has more than 1,200 members, including many from overseas, despite the fact that EDR operates only in the US (environmental professionals around the world share a need for information on best practices, Gaines explained). "You're always a little nervous when you launch one of these things," said Gaines. "You're building a platform for everyone in the industry to share information, and you never know what direction it will take, but we're really excited about how it's going."
The site (commonground.edrnet.com) is free to all, and most of the content can be seen without registering. There are several discussion boards, a number of blogs, downloadable research and white papers, an events calendar, and a few podcasts. Gaines said he is pleased to see competing environmental resource companies uploading documents for the industry to share. Going forward, new interfaces will allow environmental professionals to add data and notate other data-Gaines likens it to a large environmental data wiki.
Gaines said that although revenue models are always produced for initiatives (EDR's parent company is European media giant DMGT, a public company), this project was built mainly on faith, based on its potential to create customer loyalty and recognition within the industry.
Of course, there are revenue opportunities, should EDR decide to pursue them. "We have no plans to have ads," said Gaines. "But we can envision a time when there's sufficient value for the users and sufficient activities and that there could be premium features or functionality. It's also possible that people would pay to post jobs."
One of the greatest things to come out of the site is internal, rather than customer based, Gaines said. "It's given everyone in the company a voice. We encourage everyone to share what they do and their areas of expertise, whether it's by writing a blog, commenting on other blogs, or commenting on discussion boards." He explained that every sales and marketing person goes through rigorous training to become an expert in environmental due diligence. "This site gives our employees a platform to showcase that expertise."
Can't I just send an e-mail?
In case you're still not convinced about the value of social media ("Can't I just put it on my blog or send an e-mail?"), we offer this. As mentioned above, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy posts frequently to his blog and put up a Facebook profile about a year ago.
In April, he received a Facebook message from a third-shift maintenance person saying he'd been in a patient room, and the patient was complaining he couldn't find NESN (the channel that runs the Red Sox games). Levy replied, letting him know the hospital does have NESN and the number of the channel.
At the end of the post, Levy wrote, "On a more serious note to managers out there, please note the validation of Facebook as an internal corporate communications tool. Many people of a certain generation prefer it to regular e-mail."
We'll go a step further and say that if it weren't for Levy's Facebook page, the maintenance person would not have contacted him. Social media channels may seem foreign right now, but savvy executives will recognize their value and give them the time and effort they deserve.
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This cover story from the August 2008 issue of American Executive won a silver Eddie from Folio Magazine for best single article in the design/advertising/marketing category for B2B magazines. For more please click here.
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