So you put a new business plan together for 2010. Whether your enterprise is big or small – and regardless of industry – you almost certainly discussed Social Media.
It’s the most talked about and misunderstood business activity around. It’s also one of the few business initiatives that companies are still spending on – for good reason. It can lower the cost of doing business and improve outcomes. A recent Web 2.0 survey by the legendary management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that two-thirds of respondents reported “measurable” benefits from the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
>> Lower communication and travel costs
>> More effective marketing
>> Higher customer satisfaction
Those Web 2.0 technologies include https://theblogstimes.co.uk/ blogging, video, wikis and RSS feeds, among others.
Wait a minute, you might be saying at this point, where are the references to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube? And what the devil are wikis and RSS feeds?
Don’t even worry about wikis and RSS feeds at this stage of the game. It’s blogging that we will concentrate on in this article, because blogging is the centerpiece of sensible Social Media campaigns.
It’s all fine and well to have business accounts with Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn and MySpace, but what information do you feed to them? What can you really do with a 140-character Twitter message if you don’t have a link that takes readers somewhere meaningful to them and profitable for you?
Granted, other Social Media sites give you plenty of space to tout your business, but who are you going to bet on? The first big Social Media site was MySpace. It is now in fast decline, losing members at a torrid pace. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were hardly a mention a few years ago and are now Social Media’s 800-pound gorillas. But what about a few years from now? Will they suffer the same fate as MySpace, as social networkers migrate on to swankier new sites?
That’s very likely, which is why you don’t want to make those sites the flagship of your Social Media outreach. If you build a major reservoir of content about your company on Facebook, how do you transfer all that data over to the hot, new, emerging Social Media site? That’s a problem. That’s a hassle. And we all try to minimize business problems and hassles.