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To be, or not to be (part of social media), that is the (big) question:

October 20, 2009 | 5 Comments

Writ­ten by: Lee on Octo­ber 20, 2009.

social mediaThere is a buzz around whether to incor­po­rate social media ℠ in your busi­ness or mar­ket­ing strat­egy. You see com­ments like ‘it is a fad’, ‘I don’t under­stand it’, ‘it is expen­sive’, ‘it is not mea­sur­able’ or ‘what is the ROI?’ So I decided to go on a jour­ney to get to the bot­tom of social media and inves­ti­gate whether it can be use­ful in business.

To start with I decided to see if I could find a solid def­i­n­i­tion of SM. Boy is that hard, there are so many vari­a­tions and opin­ions. The one I found most use­ful was Wikipedia’s page on SM. I like the way it is bro­ken down into dif­fer­ent types of chan­nels which make sense to me. Say­ing that some of these medi­ums may already be out-dated. I also note they feel that it needs more infor­ma­tion and resources, how­ever I found it use­ful. Here is the list from their example:

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

Blogs: Blog­ger, Live­Jour­nal, Open Diary, Type­Pad, Word­Press, Vox, Expres­sio­nEngine, Xanga
Micro-blogging / Pres­ence appli­ca­tions: Twit­ter, Plurk, Tum­blr, Jaiku, fmylife
Social net­work­ing: Bebo, Face­book, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Sky­rock, Hi5, Ning, Elgg
Social net­work aggre­ga­tion: Nut­shell­Mail, Friend­Feed
Events: Upcom­ing, Event­ful, Meetup.com

Col­lab­o­ra­tion

Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wet­paint
Social book­mark­ing (or social tagging)[5]: Deli­cious, Stum­ble­Upon, Google Reader, CiteU­Like
Social news: Digg, Mixx, Red­dit, Now­Pub­lic
Opin­ion sites: epin­ions, Yelp

Mul­ti­me­dia

Photo shar­ing: Flickr, Zooomr, Pho­to­bucket, Smug­Mug, Picasa
Video shar­ing: YouTube, Vimeo, sev­en­load
Live­cast­ing: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, Skype
Audio and Music Shar­ing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter

Reviews and Opinions

Prod­uct Reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
Busi­ness Reviews: yelp.com
Com­mu­nity Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAn­swers, Askville, Google Answers

Enter­tain­ment

Media & Enter­tain­ment Plat­forms: Cisco Eos
Vir­tual worlds: Sec­ond Life, The Sims Online, Forterra
Game shar­ing: Mini­clip, Kongregate

Other

Infor­ma­tion aggre­ga­tors: Netvibes, Twine (website)

After look­ing at this list, devel­op­ing a social media strat­egy could be con­fus­ing and seem like an enor­mous task.

What I think every­one who is con­sid­er­ing SM should do at the start is set some goals and objec­tives for what they want to get out of social media. I am often amazed at what I con­sider lim­ited think­ing when it comes to social media. I am stunned when I see com­ments that the bot­tom line is for SM to gen­er­ate sales and SM is poor at that. I do agree that gen­er­at­ing sales is a goal of every busi­ness out there. My ques­tion to peo­ple who make com­ments like that, is PR not then jus­ti­fied or research or cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­ity projects, and other busi­ness and mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties that don’t directly gen­er­ate sales?

I see SM in the same bas­ket as these and it can be used for PR, research, CRM, build­ing data­bases, com­pe­ti­tions and direct mar­ket­ing to name some. Is SM not a great way to com­mu­ni­cate and engage with your customers/clients or poten­tial customers/clients in a really fast way.

When I see peo­ple ask what’s its ROI, my answer would be that it depends on their goals and objec­tives and how they mea­sure ROI. In my expe­ri­ence of busi­ness most com­pa­nies have their own mea­sure­ments for ROI and they often dif­fer from the next. Per­haps the rea­son some are not to con­sid­er­ing SM (or object­ing) is that it is eas­ier to look the other way or find rea­sons not to con­sider SM when their time and bud­get is already stretched. I agree that some social medi­ums will dis­ap­pear and some will stay, social media will prob­a­bly evolve, but I do believe it is here to stay. Can you afford to miss the bus (or at least keep up to date with what is going on)?

I have read a num­ber of arti­cles on social media and often find them thin with usable infor­ma­tion. I am not going to call myself an expert, by my stan­dards not many peo­ple fall into that cat­e­gory in many things in life. What I am going to do is go on a jour­ney in search of case stud­ies of suc­cesses and inves­ti­gate the dif­fer­ent chan­nels of social media and the dif­fer­ent prac­tices within it e.g. SM Opti­miza­tion. I hope to uncover how the dif­fer­ent medi­ums could be used and how they can be mea­sured. I will add my knowl­edge, expe­ri­ences and thoughts to this. I know this is a big under­tak­ing and would value everyone’s input and sug­ges­tions and even recommendations.

I will report back on each social medium that I inves­ti­gate and report back in a series of arti­cles, unfor­tu­nately I can not say how many there will be as this is a real time investigation.

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  2. Social media ROI – real­ity or fantasy?
  3. YouTube for Business



5 Comments so far

  1.    Lee on November 10, 2009 11:33 am      Reply

    Thanks Bill it is always nice to hear peo­ple enjoy read­ing my blog :)

  2.    bill on November 3, 2009 3:55 pm      Reply

    Cool blog, enjoy fol­low­ing it greatly!

  3.    Lee on October 22, 2009 1:43 pm      Reply

    Melainie, I would love to hear how your organ­i­sa­tion is mea­sur­ing ROI for SM as this is one of the aspects of my investigation.

    Adele great feed-back. I tried your link but it didn’t work :(

  4.    Adele Berenstein on October 21, 2009 4:35 pm      Reply

    Excel­lent post. Thank you for sharing.

    I think one of the basic prob­lems com­pa­nies are hav­ing is that the web is so broad and con­stantly chang­ing and social media uses are still fairly new for many busi­ness to busy to fol­low it, that they don’t know what are real­is­tic objec­tives to set.

    In my blog, (see http://budurl.com/p5zv) I focus on how Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion strate­gies are chang­ing with social media and how some com­pa­nies are doing well and some that are not.

    I think the first thing a com­pany should do with Social Media is to get edu­cated as to what objec­tives are pos­si­ble and then start lis­ten­ing to cus­tomer feed­back. Then they can set some objectives.

    Adele

  5.    Melanie on October 21, 2009 3:39 pm      Reply

    Hav­ing worked in an organ­i­sa­tion that man­ages ROI report­ing suc­cess­fully social media can com­pli­ment a busi­ness in terms of sales and brand­ing, how­ever I think you are totally right in your blog to say that there must be a clear objec­tive before embark­ing on social media activ­ity as with­out it there is no direc­tion and it is an over­whelm­ing mine­field to know what is right for the business.

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