I wasn't "born into the facebook revolution, I'm in no way a "generation Y" or a digital native. When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was the most ridiculous concept. I couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would want to participate in all this social stuff. I'm a pretty private person, so posting so much information about myself and exposing it for the world to see was the most un-natural thing for me.
Actually, it still is.
The only difference is that now I see the value in all of this. I think there are different types of benefit categories to be gained from social media:
Know "what's going on":
Being a research analyst, I have to be updated about my coverage topics (Enterprise applications, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Social tools, MDM, BPM etc.) Staying on top of things means I have to go through about 20-30 websites a day. With 4-5 meetings a day there's very little spare time to read and research. The 70 people/sources I currently follow on Twitter actually provide me with the highlights of what's going on in topics that interest me in a nutshell, and that's pretty cool. This is REAL value for me. It's kind of the same value I would have gotten from RSS but it's all pretty new to me.
Know what people are saying about your brand:
This is something I am, personally, less familiar with. But I think for companies who want to check out their brand impact, the acceptance of new products just released to the market, social media and things like Twitter in particular, can give a real time snapshot that can begin to answer these types of questions. It doesn't replace traditional market research tools but should be looked at as a whole new set of tools that didn't exist so far because people didn't share so much real time data about what they're doing or thinking.
Damage control or crisis management:
Social media is the best platform, in my opinion, to provide instant, personal-like feedback to a crisis.
Of course, it also works the other way around: when your brand "messes-up" something, social media is the quickest way to make sure this mistake will spread around very quickly. Even if it's something very small, for example – 1.3 million (to date) people saw a video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on a customer's couch, while waiting on hold for Comcast call center.
At this stage, if a company's big enough that people will talk about it with their friends, it WILL have presence on social networks, like it or not. If a crisis occurs and is magnified in social media tools, the most effective way would be to reply by using the same social tools and social networks: respond by using the same media. For more – see an interesting post that discusses this "fighting fire with fire" strategy.
These are just a few examples of how social media provides the type of value that didn't exist before. I've been talking to several large companies in Israel lately on how social media applies to their organization. Most of them have no idea, some are actually thinking about it, but most are "brushing this trend away", saying they don't think there's real value.
I think companies should start to think and act quickly. And if most companies are not there yet, there's even a larger advantage to be gained for the early adopters.
Happy new year, Shana Tova!
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