Finbarr McCarthy

Does Your Business Benefit From Social Media?

The unfortunate truth is that for 9 out of 10 people reading this, the answer is probably no. If you think thats bad, it gets worse, many companies are actually doing tremendous damage to their brands reputation with poorly though out attempts at using Social Media. The bad users of social media usually have one thing in common, “no buy-in”. The lack of buy-in leads to a lack of strategy and a lack of funding/resources. The typical scenario unfolds when somewhere within a company, somebody decides that social media is free and worth a shot, passes off the responsibility of implementing and maintaining a presence to someone who is unskilled in the use of social media. In the abscence of strategy and skill, most well intentioned, but unplanned social media campaigns quickly turn into a gigantic spam-fest where the perpetrators get addicted to feevourishy following people and bombarding them with one sided messages.  Remember email campaigns gone bad? It was called spam and there was a tonne of legislation brought in all over the world to combat it.

For a company to suceed in social media there has to be a little re-think on traditional marketing and PR. In the past very clever people came up with very clever messages and pushed them through the appropriate channels.  Companies who try doing this with social media will fail, pretty much 100% of the time.

Social media is different, consider it more like a place where people get together and talk, as opposed to a media channel.  if you push your message incessently without talking to people, or more importantly without listening, you will quickly look like a complete idiot and will be shunned by the community. While there are no rules per se, there is common sense.  Imagine you are a sales person and you show up at a social gathering and start screaming out loud about what you are selling today! I dont think you would do that, you would probably mingle a bit, chat with people strike up a little rapport and if the appropriate opportunity arises, tell the people you are speaking with about what you do and if welcomed to do so, pitch your product or service to them.

In a future post I will put some specific ideas together on how to most effectively use social media to promote your company, your products and services. In the meanwhile if you are not using social media to benefit your business jump in and start a conversation, if you are using social media as a one-way feed STOP AND LISTEN.

I found a bunch of very good presentations on this topic on the web, Social Media Presentations. Have a look through them and let me know what you think.

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