What is social media and why do you need it?

6th February, 2009 - Josh Peters

It wasn’t too long ago that businesses were asking the same thing about websites and now it’s hard to find a business that doesn’t have a web site. Some of their sites are great, full featured, engaging and enjoyable to use. Others are garish, hard to navigate, and fail left and right. The point is that they have one because they know the value of having and the detriment of not.

The web is rapidly changing though. People are no longer content to just sit back and have content shoved down their throats. You, me, them, us as consumers have become tired of the same old way of doing business day in and day out so we flee to the internet by the millions. We are abandoning the brick and mortar in favor of the point and click. We’re becoming more aware of our time and the value of it, and it’s factoring in to our buying habits at an incredible rate.

Ease of purchase and information are not the only reasons people are making a mass exodus to the promised land of the digital age, they are running to find a human connection. It sounds absurd but it’s true. Even the long standing king of the internet is even falling under the overwhelming popularity of this medium as social networking alone is surpassing Porn. When you add in the numbers of social Bookmarking, social commenting, social shopping, and all the other sub categories of social media you get a force that has decidedly left the “adult industry” in the dust as surfers #1 reason of getting online.

Social media is a vast array of tools, sites, and methods for connecting with fellow human beings in ways that create a fully immersive, interactive, multi-media experience. Smart companies are seeing this and capitalizing on it. Dell is using social media to help customers, generate new ideas, and in the course of a year made a million dollars using Twitter. Comcast is helping customer with technical and service related issues and gaining a lot of press about it. Using these tools they are creating a whole new meaning to the Comcast Cares motto.

Jet Blue, Zappos, SanDisk, and many more are coming on to engage their customers in new ways that meet the customers where they are. It’s the next best thing to making house calls.

Social media isn’t a fad, it isn’t hip new thing, within a couple short years that term will disappear and it will just be called the internet. It’s the evolution of communication, the next step in human connectivity, and a very effective way to disseminate information to the willing masses.

Just like the “web 1.0″ website that came before it the companies who joined the electronically interconnected world reaped the benefits while those who didn’t stayed behind till they figured out if this internet thing would last. They were the late comers to the game and suffered by playing catch up for way too long.

I’m sure you’ve read the horror stories of brands getting punk’d by social media. Companies who fell short of the mark and paid for it in their customers eyes. There is one glaring point that all of these examples fell short of in their attempts. Simply put they didn’t get it.

They didn’t understand that this is an evolution not a revolution. They didn’t understand that the old methods can’t be used in the world of new media. That customers won’t abide being shouted at in their conversations. Social media is the embodiment of the long forgotten soft sale. It’s a farmers market for the digitally enabled.

Now you’re beginning to understand what social media is, but does your company need it? The answer to that question is to ask more questions.

• Do your customers like conversations and enjoy being treated like a human? (The answer to this is always yes, it’s human nature)
• Are your customers online? (If you don’t know the answer send me an email)
• Do you want your company to have a human touch? (This should be a resounding yes)
• Are you a fan of feedback, data, and analysis? (Really who isn’t)

Simply put social media marketing is a way to communicate with you customers that is incredibly trackable. The numbers can be broken down and analyzed from multiple vantage points to tell you exactly what is happening. You can’t get exact numbers of how many people see your billboard, but with all the measuring and monitoring tools you can not only tell exactly how many people visited your site but where they came from (referring site or part of the world), and even what browser they are using.

Use the social media to drive people to your site and you can see exactly how effective it is compared to a billboard which is at best an educated guess. Besides, people are starting to expect it.

- Josh “Shua” Peters

Image by Elsie esq