I wasn’t going to talk anymore about the social media phenom…but two events today convinced me otherwise.
The first was my friend Jackie Kuehl’s blog: Should I blog, tweet, link, or create a Facebook group? Does anyone really care?
http://tinyurl.com/cjkg2u In it she laments that most organizations are quite confused about social media, and attempt to justify or rationalize its use using old tools and old thinking.
That got me thinking about an event about fifteen years ago at a Fortune 100 company where I was a sales and marketing executive. In the early 90’s when websites and the internet were first commercializing, many companies were wrestling with “should I have a website?”…and “what is the ROI of a website?” I vividly remember a “discussion” I had with our CEO about establishing a branded website for our company. I was FOR, he was AGAINST. He won (in 1993).
My pitch was that by establishing a website --- though it wouldn’t be used much in 1993 --- would not only brand us as “leading edge” but would establish a communication link with exactly the kinds of customers we wanted. In addition, as long as we focused on the right content, whatever we developed could also be created as literature or hand outs for those not online. I guess that was somewhat prescient of me, eh? Today, good company websites do exactly that, and are a minimum requirement for all businesses.
The second event was a webinar this afternoon sponsored by HubSpot on “How to Use (and justify) social media in your business”.
It was simply AMAZING. It dealt with the exact issues discussed in Jackie’s blog. And it concurrently used Twitter for discussion and Q&A. Some resources cited were:
I feel certain that as Web 2.0 evolves to 2.5 and beyond, social media tools will dominate communication with customers and interest groups. We are in the middle of a sea change in business. You can either get on the boat, or watch it sail away.
“There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
--- seen on a Geek’s t-shirt at Micro Center.