Are you using social networking or social media in your marketing mix?

If so, you probably know that twitter was recently the victim of a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.  Earlier today I read a blog post by Michelle MacPherson – an expert in social media networking – called Why Social Media Sucks, which got me thinking about it – especially because right now it’s the “next big thing” and it seems like everyone and their brother is on the bandwagon about how social media can make or break your business.

It’s no secret that the world of media and marketing has changed.

Television viewing is down, subscriptions to newspapers and magazines are down – and ad revenues are in the toilet – to the point that even some of the biggest have announced they’re closing their doors…

  • Time Inc. recently announced they’re closing the doors on “Southern Accents”

And according to Newspaper Death Watch, the following papers have closed their doors since 2007.

And people are moving to social networking sites like twitter and facebook by the thousands.

But what does that mean to you and your business?

If you look at some of the information that’s out there, you may think you’re supposed to get out there and get as many followers as possible.

But as Michelle points out in her article, “Social media sucks when it’s all you’ve got.  400,000 Twitter followers doesn’t mean jack if you can’t reach them when Twitter is down.(I’m picking on Twitter here, but this applies for any social networking platform. Facebook fan pages with 5k fans suck when Facebook is down.  And so on). The goal with social media isn’t just to amass large numbers of subscribers. (If they’re untargeted subscribers, perhaps people who are just following you so that you follow them back, they’re pretty much worthless anyway)…”

So what is the point of using Social Media, and is it worth the time and effort in your business?

I think the answer is yes.

Social media is the new media.  It’s us as consumers deciding who, deciding when and deciding how – we want to get news, information and messages.

It’s here to stay – and, according to Seth Godin, in his latest ebook, “Who’s There – Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web” – “… Social media, blogging especially, is social. Not antiseptic or anonymous or corporate. This means that the writing skills you and your organization have honed aren’t going to help you very much. When you write at your audience, or even to your audience, you’ve made it really clear that you think that they are the other, and you think that they are yours. It is not your audience, of course. The audience belongs to itself. And if you talk as if they are not like you, then it’s awfully difficult to keep up your position of power…”

So getting back to the question of how you should use social media for your online business, here are my thoughts.

Your Website should be the main place your customers and prospects come when they’re ready to buy your products or services.

You can and should be driving traffic to your Website in a variety of different ways – remembering, of course, to go where your customers are already at and talking to them in their language, answering the questions they want answered.

And use social media or social networking as a tool to personalize the conversation.  To create a community, not followers.

And we’ll get into what “community” means from  your business’ perspective in the next post.

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