(photo courtesy of idfive)
Social Media is an enabling platform
Social Media is not a niche in Marketing. Social Media is a powerful enabler. A powerful enabling technology (or platform). Yes, YOU read that right. Social Media is a technology. Not in the hardware form but as a software. Google is an enabler. Amazon.com is an enabler. Facebook is an enabler. They are all enabling platforms that allow CONVERSATIONS to happen.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started writing code and creating Google – they did it to organize information. But why do we need to organize information? We need it so we can find the right information for our needs in a particular moment in time and apply that information to whatever we are doing. In short, we need organized information (if I may call it that) to make decisions. Decisions are conversations. We talk to other people. We talk to ourselves. We talk to the experts. And we take action. Conversations are the lifeblood of most organizations. People make decisions based on how they read the market, based on the results of their conversations. Google has allowed us to talk with a computer and get the information we need. That's an amazing conversation!
Amazon.com is an enabler. It has enabled ordinary men and women to order books (and other products) by a single click of a button anywhere in the world at an affordable cost. Furthermore, it has allowed customers from all across the globe to post reviews on their favorite books and not-so-favorite books. Again, the keyword is CONVERSATIONS. Due to Amazon.com, reading books became cool again. Amazon brought this conversations on books (and now, other products) to a global scale. Book reviews by major newspapers are now being sidelined by reviews made by ordinary people who in fact have been touched by these books. Amazon.com is a conversation starter.
Facebook is currently the ultimate conversation enabler. Facebook has over 410m registered users. By next year, 1/6 of the globe's population will be on Facebook. Facebook has allowed family and friends to connect with each other online. It allows anyone to share a photo, a website link, a video, a note or everything else in between to whoever is in his or her network. CONVERSATIONS are the lifeblood of any market. And today, Facebook is the noisiest of them all. Facebook is an enabler. It has made distance irrelevant in everyday communications. Sure, face-to-face meetings are still important and probably won't be replaced by virtual meetings but we can only benefit from being able to talk with our loved ones, friends and clients from afar.
Social Media then cannot be viewed as just part of a marketing strategy. Social Media is an enabling technology. It facilitates the smooth execution of a good strategy. It also facilitates instant failure of a flawed strategy. This is where most businesses and organizations get the wrong idea. You need to be present in social media tools. Whether you like it or not, people (hint: your customers) are going to talk about you on the web. It's easier and it's user-friendly. So you can't dismiss this as a fad. Or even consider its covered when you hire some of the so called social media experts and do campaigns for you.
The entire organization should be prepared for social media work. You may not know but one of your employees may actually be broadcasting his take on the company's mission and goals (or worse strategies and tactics) on the web already. Social Media is a powerful tool but left on its own, you'll never know how it might come back to haunt you or the huge opportunities that you aren't tapping.
Conversations are the foundation of any market. Before people decide to buy anything. They talk it out in their heads. Sometimes they talk it out with family and friends. And now, most of us search online for the best (and cheapest) deals in town before buying anything. This is something that no business can ever control. What you can do is participate. In fact, it's imperative that you participate. If your voice is not being heard, don't expect for any of your strategies to work. This is still a bit debatable (esp. in Third World countries) but we are getting there. Expect individuals to talk about you whether you like it or not in the future. So instead of waiting for your competitors to set the tone of conversations in the market – you should join in now and maybe get the chance to get your voice heard and win your 'customers.'
If you care about your customers, you need to utilize social media tools now. Enable your customers to submit ideas and concepts for your team to consider. Invite your customers to see how you work. Ask them to test your ideas and prototypes. Bounce off ideas with them. Blog about your activities, goals and aspirations. Talk to them. In the long run, they'll feel a geniune connection with you – hear you out when you make mistakes and defend you from critics. Social Media makes it easy for any business to enable these conversations. But do this only when you are ready. And here I come to the last point, your entire organization should be ready to talk when you decide to engage your audience. Or else you'll make a fool of yourself. And lose some business.
Are you maximizing social media tools today? Not everything is for your business. But try some that really gets your customers talking. Listen to them. And calibrate (and re-calibrate) your strategies and actions towards the insights you get until you succeed. Then do this all over again. Never rest on your laurels.
Goodluck!
P.S.
The best execution strategy is from Nike: JUST DO IT! And from Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi: Ready. Fire. Aim.
Please send in your questions.
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