During the past week or three I have read several articles which outline various reasons why companies are moving away from social media – economy, value, etc. No reason to post links to the stories, they’re all crap.
The funny thing about social media is it isn’t anything new, nothing revolutionary. It’s simply an evolution of how we communicate – with our customers, employees, families (just last night I tweeted “@emily time for dinner” and moments later she came downstairs), everyone.
More to the point, it is everything every company president said they really, really want. I know I heard it in my days of corporate life, “Two way communications offers the most valuable insight into our customers and employees”, “Listening is more powerful than talking to any company”, “If there was just a way to listen to every single one of our customers.” Happy Holiday folks, you got your wish – and it is a good one.
Back to those companies who want to return their gift. For a company to say they are pulling away from social media is ridiculous. Just because they decide to stop participating doesn’t mean the rest of the world will. As a side, if they don’t understand this basic tenet of social media they probably ought not to have engaged in it in the first place.
Another point – you can’t tell me the money currently invested and expense is so great it will save you? More important, do you care so little about the conversations taking place online you are willing to walk away? Perhaps you should also cancel your subscription to the WSJ, your local paper and cable so you don’t waste money watching CNN anymore. By the way, even the media outlets which are hemorrhaging in the current market understand the value and continue to move full steam ahead toward a media convergence.
The value of social media (by the way, I am really starting to hate those words… what do they mean any more??) is so huge I would consider any company not engaged to be making a fatal flaw in their business plan. For the love of Chris people, I own a small pet boutique and we are fully engaged and plan to sink more money and time into it in the coming year.
Regarding the articles I read, maybe I didn’t read between the lines or they just didn’t go deep enough in their journalistic efforts. Perhaps the headline and theme of the stories should be, “Companies which scuttle social media effort show first sign of future demise.” That, I believe, is the real story.
(Note, I really didn’t tweet my daughter to come to dinner, I did it the old fashioned way and screamed from the bottom of the stairs).
I’m glad you didn’t tweet to your daughter, though shamefully I believed it. I love receiving tweets from the Dallas Morning News. Social media is no longer a new movement in my opinion (at least not anymore), but rather a way of engaging in a new way for some.
I agree with you 100% about how ridiculous it is to say you’ll pull away from social media. Seems to me that you’d turn even more to social media during an economic downturn to scrap for every single buyer or client.
A few examples of social media influencing our buying habits, on a personal level are…
Zappos CEO regularly engages his Twitter followers. I actually had never used Zappos until his interesting twitter feed put the thought to always check there first for shoes. From that, I have encouraged two others to purchase from Zappos. All because I hear him “speaking to me”. Normally I would have just chose Amazon, but Zappos put a “face” to who I was buying from.
The other is local. Ryan Parrott (@chefrp his twitter name) saw me speaking to my wife on Twitter, asking if we wanted to give Iguana a second chance. He saw that we didn’t enjoy our first time there and DMd me. We tried again and we’ve been weekly loyalists ever since. Again, putting a face to the restaurant.
yes, great post. I’m excited to be taking the social media course (despite my fears of taking 21 hours + working 15 h/wk!) It’s going to be so worth it!
great post!