Social media has quickly become commercially viable over the past year and a half as companies large and small have recognized its value. While today you’d be hard pressed to find a major company not involved in social media, occasionally one does pop up.
I happened upon one a few weeks ago. My first reaction was surprise, and perhaps a little disbelief. I thought, perhaps I’ve missed their official profile. So I did more digging and realized that I had not: Profiles for them exist on Facebook, some with more than 100k followers, but none of them are “official.”
For companies like this, all is not lost. While they do have hundreds of thousands of customers talking about their brand in the social space every day, often without an official voice to be found, that does not mean that the company should sit back and observe. They should seize the opportunity that is before them.
This is a primary barrier for many businesses that are considering becoming more active in social media: We use social media, but our customers don’t — so what’s the point?
My advice to businesses confronted with this dilemma: See it as an opportunity, not a barrier.
Your current customers may not be using social media so much that it makes sense to spend money to market to them — but your potential customers certainly are.
Social media engagement offers your company an opportunity to do a minor re-brand. You don’t need to change your identity, or your logo.
Last week I wrote a post about whether your company needs an online community manager. In today’s business climate, it’s becoming an increasingly important position to have as part of your staff. I still believe that.
But the post I read this morning by Richard Millington, an online community consultant, made me realize that while some companies can make due with just one community manager, larger companies will need a team.
Richard breaks it down into five roles: The Friend, The Recruiter, The Enforcer, The Editor, and The Entrepreneur.
If your community is growing and you need to recruit more people, it makes sense to split these roles. Let the editors focus on content, the entrepreneurs focus on business development and the recruiter recruit.
Until recently the business attitude toward social media was to build a branded outpost on Facebook or Twitter, populate it with content and direct customers to it. While this has worked well for a few years, patterns are emerging that suggest social media is maturing and becoming more vertical.
This trend towards vertical online communities presents businesses with a choice: Leverage Facebook and Twitter to develop your online community and online customer experience, or develop your own bespoke online community.
For many companies it will come down to a matter of budget: Twitter and Facebook are free, or nearly free (depending on whether you pay for added options) whereas developing an online community costs money to plan, build and maintain. Sites such as socialengine and Ning both offer the ability to develop branded online communities, for a price.
Even though his face was really made for TV, Renaissance Creative’s Social Media Strategist, Ben Lamothe will be working out his vocal chords this coming Monday. Ben will be joining host, Melissa Ross, on our local NPR / PBS affiliate, 89.9FM’s “First Coast Connect” at 9am (7/12/10), to discuss the Crisis in the Gulf. Ben will specifically be addressing BP’s social media response to the crisis. After a fumbling start, BP now has substantial social media strategy in place- but is it working, or being upstaged by Twitter’s satirical BPGlobalPR? Ben will let us know his thoughts. This is educational stuff, so tell your boss to “Back off!” (…or “Tune in!”).
