Using Social Media to better communicate …
Some might still wonder why using Social Media will help businesses to better communicate.
The evolution of technology, social tools, and ease of access are driving rapid advancements in communication. People like to play, create, share, and comment about companies and their brands. The fear about letting people “in” to their brand, so to speak, can be looked at one of two ways. Companies can either be fearful of what people may do to their brand, which “they” will do anyways, or, companies can celebrate that people are interested in their brand, products, and services. Companies should listen to what people have to say, they may learn something. Companies should engage people in their business challenges, they may solve them for them.
In her latest presentation Laurence Borel reminds us of what Chris Anderson Editor of Wired Magazine have said: ‘Your brand is what Google says it is, not what you say your brand is.’ Laurence points at the 4 Ps of social media marketing: People, Participation, Publishing and Page rank.
David Cushman thinks that the phrase ’social media’ should be deconstructed into two words social + media, as the focus should be 90% on the social and 10% on media.
That doesn’t mean there’s no role for the media side. It plays a critical one, without which the social doesn’t get to happen – but it does reflect where the value lays, who creates it and how.
Social =
- The social technologies that connect us
- People
- Groups
- Hands and feet
- Action
- What we choose to do together
Media =
- That which flows through social technologies
- Content
- Distribution
- Mouths and ears
- Conversation
- What they would seek to do to us/get us to do
…
So broadening the listening for what’s wrong with your brand, as experienced by end-users, effectively delivers crowd-sourced improvements – R&D and NPD – in rapid iteration and at small cost.
Make no mistake – there is much more to this than reputation management.
Social + Media generates low-cost NPD, R&D, P2P Marketing, Advertising, Recruitment and all that reputation management warmth, too.
The process adapts the org to the expressed needs of the network (people) – it transforms your organisation into one in which the greater part of its energy is generated from beyond the organisation – and one in which that increased energy nourishes a growing, changing and responding org.
A word cloud of the 382 words from Wikipedia’s page (excluding references and the words “social” and “media”) shows the four commonest words are (1) community, (2) information, (3) sharing and (4) technologies. These strung together make a straightforward definition “Community information sharing technologies.” (Note: the prominence of the word “industrial” results from considerable space being devoted to distinguishing social media from traditional media such as print, television and radio.)
