Keeping Tabs on Your Competition

Keeping Tabs on Your Competition

via Posterize

Social Media Isn't a Fad....

There's been a lot of interesting discussions about the merits of social media lately.

One of the biggest problems is the lack of understanding about what social media is, what it does, how it impacts the "bottom line," is there an ROI, and how to tell if "it's working?"? I'm sure the internet was that way in the beginning too.

Is it a fad or is it here to stay?

How do managers quantify something they don't understand? Traditional advertising execs really don't want everyone to have interaction with customers... they want customers to fall into the sales funnel and let their metircs take over.

Well, it isn't a fad, it's not going away, and they are going to have to figure out a way to deal with it.

So what happens next?

Brent King (author 'Bank 2.0') wrote an interesting post on Huffington today. Here's a couple of key points he mentions...

• So the first trick with social media and how it's going to effect the business is learning about how it works. The knee jerk reaction for most banks when social media came along was two fold; The first was to try to figure out how to dump traditional advertising and PR campaigns down the pipe. The second was to shut down any access internally within the organization because it was risky for employees to talk directly to the public, and also because it was feared there would be wholesale time wastage from staff playing Farmville and other sorts of unproductive, non-work related tasks.
• The marketing-led thinking about attempts to control or spin the brand message out through social media characterized as just another broadcast channel, are also fundamentally flawed. Social media is more akin to a dialog with your broader customer audience, not a channel for slamming more corporate comms or campaigns down customer's throats. Thus, the traditional marketing metrics don't apply either.
• Social media can be used to build brand and advocacy, support and service customers, research new strategies, design new products, create new markets, and to educate and inform. This is going to require a whole kaleidoscope of supporting skills sets and capabilities underneath to do this properly. So if you limit it to being pigeonholed into the current organization structure, somewhere along the line your social media strategy is going to be deficient.
• The biggest risk businesses face today is clearly reputational risk associated with a social media blowout. You need someone in charge with common sense, but also with the organizational wherewithal to actually get something done. This is not a junior role. 

Here's a link to his full post - well worth the read: