What is Social Media?

Is your company already social?

You might answer this question with "Yes of course, we have a company blog" or "We tweet all our product updates" or "Stupid question, we have 14943 friends on Facebook" or something similar.

That is very nice, but are you really socializing with your customers? Does it bring you anything?

Just starting a blog or forum does not necessarily mean being social. It could just be using new media for an old marketing approach.

Social Media, what is it?

To get a better answer to this question we better should rephrase the question to a more simple:

What is Social?  - and skip the 'media' word.

This shorter question will return different answers. Some keywords that could be included: interaction, listen, interest, others, relationship, connecting, sharing.

An answer could be:

Being social is listen to others and show interest, invest in an interactive relationship, connect to strangers and share information.

Being Social on the Web is actually the same, the purpose is not to start a blog or podcast, but to interact with customers. Using Web 2.0 techniques will help you to achieve this objective.

Using social media can bring many advantages

Expand your traditional marketing channels like your website, surveys and email marketing.

• Listen to your customers and prospects what they think about you.
• Two direction communication instead of Top Down.
• Build a relationship with your customers.
• Customers help you with promoting your services or products.
• Implement cost-efficient ways to support your customers.
• Reduce costs on operating, support and marketing.

Start-up considerations

• Invest in the right tool
  If your target audience is not visiting forums or does not write in them, then better not start a forum but a FAQ page on your corporate site. 
  Investigate your audience (Country, age, sex can really make difference in behaviour). A good way to find out is to listen: search the internet on keywords related to your business to find out where they are.
• Be careful for negative directions
  Think of this: Your latest product is not as good as expected and the community hates it, the community will use the social media tools to break it down. You need to be prepared to stop negative directions and turn them into a positive ones.

Last notes 

• Don't worry, your Company or Brand is still serious when not yet doing the Social Media thing.
• Indeed Web 2.0 is a hype, don't let it it drag you into something that turns back to you.
• Embracing social media on the web requires investigations and a solid business case.
• Once you get it off the ground, it is hard to stop again.
• In most situations it will be worth the effort.

Related links:

Social Networks for online marketing