There are still some places out there where social media is seen as an optional extra. Most brands want to give the impression that they are world class. If people dispute that, then consider why folks have websites. Because you want to increase your reach. But having a website with updates on an ad hoc basis and hoping that you are found is the kind of thinking that is often made fun of in polite society.
If you’re still contemplating whether or not you need a social media presence, consider this: Do you want to stop making money? Do you want to reach a point and say “this is enough, I’m going to stop right here.” Of course not. Because that is retarded and stupid.
Point of the matter is that we now live in world that we can call the “Global Village” people make calls to people in different timezones. People fall in love with people online before they meet. Connectivity is drawing us closer together and your products and services are now available to the world. Are you still thinking about Social Media?
If you are the person that gets paid the big cheese to make the big decisions then you should be seeing the big picture. The majority of people on this continent access the internet from their mobile phones. Most popular activity = Social Networking. Your website does not feature because the whole mechanism is incomplete. No one pays attention to printed brochures and flyers. In fact, it makes us wonder how many trees had to die for you to congest our mailboxes. Electronic is the way and if you don’t establish a foundation now where will you be when connectivity is as common as Justin Bieber hairdos at a 6 year old’s birthday party?
Social media is not a selling medium and for heaven’s sake please do not think of it as free because free is what results in a disaster. Understanding of the arena as well as the skill required to maneuver the hybrid function of Social Media is needed most of all. The benefits are that you establish a pattern and a plan for your brand in the social media area. A plan is important when you build a community that comes to rely on you for information. Sure you’ve tried mailing lists with weekly newsletters and most of the time people end up deleting it, social media becomes about creating valuable content and that content being worthy of sharing.
I can’t convince someone who still asks if we have social media. I don’t think I am being arrogant because as far as I am concerned, if you are still asking those questions then you don’t see the picture and I shouldn’t be talking to you anyway. People are being connected by the millions everyday and soon there will be parity between the PC user experience and the mobile user experience. Smart devices are becoming cheaper. The point is that when everyone can do everything from their handset, why on earth would they trust in a business without the foresight to invest in social media?
HHP
the only part you’re missing out is that Social Media isn’t only something to participate in – i.e. by providing cross channel integration, web presence and service design for your product/brand/other to leverage off social velocities.
But, this is a fairly fickle and young behaviour-dependent discipline. The only truly excellent Social Media practitioners (Scobleizer, Godin, and the rest) are primarily content generators.
The more strategically and competitively significant use of Social Media is to attach it to underlying business systems. Mass customisation which can attach to either personal details, photos, or networks of acquaintances is the obvious, but when you start putting intelligent intelligence design that can give you hyper thin market slices (all 18-21 year old males who play console games and are single) and the sort of analytics that show you where more variable-x sophisticated readers come from (twitter link vs facebook links, iPad vs desktop sites), I believe, are infinitely more powerful than having a web presence.
Social media is the froth of what is an inherently an identity-symantec (social) internet which characterises itself with content (or media). Social media just happens to be the Venn Diagram of the two, for the moment. The characterisation can change at a whim, but the underlying identity architecture is too entrenched to gloss over.
I might disagree with you that Social Media is not a selling platform. I am happy to engage with someone on a chat around which products are better suited to me before I purchase. Please note that I say ‘chat’ which indicates a two way conversation, not the current spam that is plastered all over Twitter when a specific key word is mentioned.
This takes us out of the age of plastering your brand all over the walls and despoiling the countryside and into the space of talking to me about why I should take a specific brand or product, actually talking to me.
I think that we are some way away from being at the point where people understand the tie in between talking to a customer as well as taking them through the product application process, but I feel in my water that this is the way of the future.