Social Networks: The New Reality
By C.J. Mittica
October, 2009
More people use online social media than check e-mail. Here’s how to best use Facebook and Twitter – and what it will mean for your business. Plus, a primer on each of the Big Four online networks.
Fittingly, all it takes is a two-minute online video to explain the power of social media for business.
“The Breakup” stars two people meeting at a restaurant: the Consumer, a winsome woman, and the Advertiser, a smug man (he’s the one examining his reflection in the silver spoon). She says the relationship is over because he doesn’t care. He doesn’t understand; what about the TV spot and the billboard? “That was like a 200-foot-tall declaration of love,” he rationalizes. It doesn’t matter for her. She wants a dialogue. “I’ve changed, and you haven’t,” she says conclusively. “We don’t even hang out in the same places anymore.”
To Jason Alba, social media expert and author of I’m On Linked In – Now What???, it explains the fundamental difference between online social networking and the traditional means of advertising and communication. “When I do presentations at the corporate level,” he says, “I try to show that video because it really helps people understand, ‘Oh my gosh, things are changing and I need to move with the changes.’”
With social media, change has come today. More people (two-thirds of all global Internet users) now visit social network sites than they use e-mail, according to a March 2009 report by Nielsen. Over one-third (35%) of all U.S. Web users over the age of 18 have a social networking profile, compared to 8% just four years ago. Major services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn (click on links for primers on how best to use each service for business) have reached critical mass status – over 150 million people worldwide in Facebook’s case, the number-one member community site. It’s no longer an option for business. “If your client demographic is on it, then you need to be on it,” says Mark Graham, president of Rightsleeve (asi/308922), a Web-savvy Canadian distributorship. “And if you’re not on it, you’re not credible.”
It appears ad specialty distributors are getting the message. A recent social networking study conducted by ASI found that nearly 90% of respondents feel that social networking already is or will be a good way to promote their business. More than half of distributors have a profile on either Facebook or LinkedIn. But despite all that, about 47% of distributors still aren’t sure how to best use social media for their business.
That dilemma is a persistent problem for all companies. Social networking has been a major factor for four years on the Web, but it is still very new to many – especially those in the business world. Plus, as Graham points out, companies are taking Web site models developed in dorm rooms and basements (for a very non-corporate use) and trying to adapt it for business. B-to-B companies can’t help but wonder: How will this help me land new business? How can I directly link this to sales? Where is the ROI?
“As a marketing tool to bring in new customers or retain customers, it’s not probably that useful yet,” says Mark Yokoyama, director of marketing and merchandising at ePromos (asi/188515), echoing the sentiments of many.
But that’s the rub of social networking: You do business by not doing business. “When you start treating it like a community, which it is, you’re going to make more friends, therefore you’re going to sell more merchandise to more people,” says Bobby Lehew, director of operations for Robyn Promotions (asi/309656). “If you treat it like a marketing campaign, you might as well not even try.”
Have Your Heart In The Right Place
Eric Marasco, owner of Proforma Distinctive Marketing (asi/300094), had been following a manufacturing rep on Twitter. When an order came in and Marasco needed a product quickly, he was figuring out what to do – until he saw an everyday tweet from the salesman. “He ended up getting a $600 order out of me because I saw him on Twitter,” Marasco says.
Stories like this may be few and far between, because social networking for business is still maturing and distributors are becoming more familiarized with it. But these incidents demonstrate a key idea about social networking: creating a presence. It’s about establishing your brand. Demonstrating your culture. Or simply being there for people. “My focus,” says Marasco, who is also on LinkedIn and Facebook, “is to be more of a knowledge source out there and try to show people who I know and network with that I’m an expert in the promotional printing industry.”
Whatever your message is, there are a multitude of ways to get it out there – everything from local social networks to the mega-behemoth services like Facebook and Twitter. (This doesn’t even mention blogs and photo-sharing sites like Flickr, which may not fall directly under the social network umbrella but are intensely intertwined with it.)
More importantly, the landscape is changing quickly. MySpace was the number one social networking site until Facebook overtook it at the end of 2008. Now Twitter is the dominant topic of conversation; it started out with 500,000 users at the beginning of last year and now has over 70 million. “It’s ease. Twitter is dead simple,” Graham explains of Twitter’s popularity. It has even begun to marginalize Facebook, and has practically become the primary means of communication for many. Says Graham, “Of all the things we’re talking about, I would say I am probably the most excited about the value of the Twitter medium compared to say, Facebook or Flickr or YouTube.”
Quite simply, the lines are blurring. The experts explain that online social networking is one and the same with real-world activities, like volunteering for your local chamber of commerce or networking at a trade show. “For some reason, people like to compartmentalize offline and online. It’s no different,” says Lehew, who teaches sessions about social networking at ASI trade shows. And in the same vein, you don’t join a local charity organization just to pitch products to your fellow members.
That dynamic is explained by Tara Hunt in her book The Whuffie Factor. “Whuffie” – a term lifted from a 2003 Cory Doctorow book – in short represents social capital. Companies that have it and cultivate it through social media thrive, Hunt explains. Those who don’t, even if they’re being authentic to themselves, tend to flounder.
“Their whole goal,” Hunt says about the successful companies, “was to create relationships and trust and help others and contribute back to the community and do all that sort of stuff.” As a result, businesses as a whole continue to do poorly and miss opportunities with social networking, even when they’re compelled to join. Adds Hunt: “They’ve embraced the tools without embracing the philosophy behind the tools.”
Change Who You Are
Learning that philosophy – and the correct way of doing things – can be accomplished. But not in an instant. Building communities through social networking takes time, and Lehew suggests it is best to learn as you go. “The thing I try to tell people is jump in, dive in, do it now, and do it poorly until you learn to do it well,” he says.
Graham agrees, but with the caveat of going slowly so as not to break the unwritten rules of each medium. “Get on it. Just try it,” he says. “You can stand on the sidelines at the beginning. Just check it out, and hear and learn and read what other people are doing.”
Even if it doesn’t lead immediately to direct sales, social media offers other payoffs, such as establishing contacts within the industry and reinforcing your brand to potential clients. Moreover, as Yokoyama points out, it’s important in general not to get behind the curve. “A lot of times it makes sense to make a modest investment even before you understand what the return is going to be,” he says.
Social networking is empowering to the little guy. One person alone can generate thousands of followers on Twitter, for example. “It has really leveled the playing field, in a sense, for a lot of companies,” says Alba. “They don’t have to have a bunch of people and a marketing team and a huge budget.”
And more importantly, they can do it without great expense – an investment of time perhaps, but very little investment of money. “Social media marketing can be the exact opposite of a financial extravagance if used on a basic level,” says Danny Rosin, president of BrandFuel (asi/145025). “Facebook, YouTube, Digg and LinkedIn are all pretty much free. There is little required from our own Web servers and infrastructure. Most allow for cross-platform marketing and offer substantial reach.”
But cheap doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Yes, there are programs like TweetDeck and Pingfm that can coordinate your updates across multiple platforms, organize your contacts and minimize the extensive amount of time that you could potentially put into everything. Yet social media may require something else: a radical change in the way distributors do business. “There’s a lot of baggage in this business,” Graham says, “that has led us to this particular place of being fairly closed and secretive. From a Web perspective, with a lot of these principles of openness and sharing in social media, I think a lot of traditional distributors are suspicious of all that stuff.”
What that means is completely embracing social media and its transforming values. Opening a two-way dialogue with customers means receiving feedback that can’t be ignored. It means doing more than putting on a front – using Twitter or Facebook to provide top-notch customer service, for example, but not offering the same degree of customer care elsewhere in your company. “I have a feeling we’ve been putting the cart before the horse in a lot of ways,” says Hunt, “and creating the perception that companies cared when the core of them hasn’t changed.”
Ultimately, distributors will have to rely on social networking as another tool in their arsenal – a requirement of business, yes, but not a total replacement of the other methods of reaching clients and contacts. “You can’t lose track of that. There’s nothing better than going into your client’s office and sitting face-to-face with them,” says Marasco.
But if there’s anyone who will truly get social media, it should be ad specialty distributors. After all, they share the same vision with social networking. “I would think that promotional products companies, they would understand this stuff because it’s kind of what ‘swag’ is about,” says Hunt. “It’s not about increasing direct sales. It’s really about these intangible touch points with customers. They’re similar in that way of creating relationships.”
C.J. Mittica is a staff writer for Counselor.
Original Article Here
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