Social Media Will Change Your Business

 Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later Editor's note: When we published "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn't see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still social media marketing services downloading the original cover story. So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we've been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We've placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story. First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they're just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they've all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It's clunkier language than blogs, but we're not putting it on the cover anyway. We're just fixing it. Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks. Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply social media marketing university the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

The right social media listening tools for the right jobs

Some of you may know that I know that I serve as a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social media listening company. Meaning? I have plenty of opinions in social media listening, but I don't claim to be unbiased about them by any means--of course I think what is social media marketing that Converseon has the best approach, combining human analysis with technology that makes that analysis scale. But I also know not everyone is willing to spend the money to attain that level of social media listening accuracy. Many of you may want to use something free, such as Hootsuite. (I see you out there.) And you can use a free tool to do social media listening-it's not against the law. I would suggest, however, that you to think very carefully about what you are using it for. You see, there are two very clear kinds of social media listening. One kind really only needs to look at individual posts-a stream of data that a human being watches on a dashboard and picks out what is relevant. If you are monitoring a crisis, or you are picking out possible job applicants, or you are trying to identify sales leads, this can work just fine with free tools, as long as you are willing to pay someone to sit in front of the screen and watch the stream. Because in a crisis you don't need to see every post, and it's OK if lots of the posts are irrelevant to the situation, as long as someone is watching and picking out what's important. If a story is very important, enough people will tweet it that you'll see it rather quickly. If 95% of the stream is irrelevant to your sales team, but they still catch the few sales leads that go by, social media marketing jobs it can work just fine, even if they also miss some leads. Free tools can be just fine in those situations. But whenever you are trying to answer questions that require aggregation of data, the free tools become a lot more difficult to use, because you won't have the right data to aggregate in the first place. For example, if the cell phone company Sprint wants to judge whether their brand mentions turned more positive when they announced their latest service plans, just putting in the word "Sprint" probably won't get the job done. In addition to finding all sorts of conversation about their company, they are likely to find lots of chatter about high school races, and they don't care very much how positive it is. And if the irrelevant data makes up 30% of the stream, you can't conclude anything. So, you clearly need something beyond keywords to do your aggregation so that you know that you have the right data. Human analysts can do it. Feeding their corrections into machine language technology can scale it.

Social media: no substitute for social impact

Last week, adherents of social media clashed with US writer and theorist, Malcolm Gladwell on the subject of whether digital activism is an effective channel for change. Gladwell, as anyone who reads the top ten business books knows, is the author of the best selling and highly influential ‘The Tipping Point’. His latest article for the New Yorker Magazine questions the importance of Twitter and Facebook in bringing about social change, social media marketing firm and takes apart claims that ‘armchair activism’ had any meaningful impact on the recent social unrest in Iran. In a provocative broadside to social media elite, he compares the activism of the US Civil Rights activists in the 1960’s to the people who Tweet messages of support during national unrest in far off authoritarian countries like Iran. In his detailed analysis of the US Civil Rights example, he points to the social bonds, moral and political values that defined a generation of people in 1960’s America to challenge segregation in southern states, where college students and their supporters braved cudgels and lynchings on a long road to securing political freedoms. But the so-called activism displayed through social media isn’t like this at all, Gladwell argues convincingly. Social activism that actually social media marketing firms changes people’s lives and the course of history is rooted in hierarchy, taking risks and sometimes, putting your safety on the line to protect your values. Rather than increasing motivation, he maintains, “social media is only effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies.”