There's lots of talk about social media. Tons. The echo is nearly deafening at this point. Freedom. Openness. We have powerful tools to communicate. We are the media. It's all about the conversation. We talk about this all the time. At the same time, more people are just starting to get into this, so it's all new and exciting and fresh again. Businesses are starting to ask, "Hey, is there something here, or is this just another billable item, like when we used to pay for someone to build brochureware for us?" Businesses are asking how this stuff all threads into their world, their terms. They're asking how we're going to change their bottom line, deliver something to their top line, make this all worth it.
Do you have an answer for them? Here are some thoughts that lead down the path of helping businesses understand the value proposition.
Things like blogs, podcasting, Utterli, Twitter, wikis, and more unified tools such as JiveSoftware and BaseCamp[191] are useful for internal processes and collaboration. I believe they are better than the tools most enterprises uses to communicate about a project. I believe the implementation of such tools is simple, requires little or no infrastructure (depending on security requirements), and most often can be cloud-operated, depending on comfort levels. These can be used in a number of ways:
Status messaging
Informational training
Project management
Knowledge management
For organizations that have a large customer base, a large partner base, or any circumstance where the audience is already fairly well defined (more often in B2C spaces), building a social network around your community such that you manage and maintain all aspects of the experience is simple. Tools like Ning and Awareness Networks[192] and several others[193] exist, can be implemented inexpensively, and deliver some potential value to a mixture of uses:
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo,[194] Orkut,[195] and others are all places where people gather. As such, one might use these areas as a place to market, a place to recruit, a place to understand the marketplace, a place to build relationships without strings (I know that's crazy talk, but hey). Have they proven fertile ground for advertising? Not for B2B. How about for B2C? The results are mixed. Ad spending is shifting online. GM announced recently that it's moving toward spending one-third of its ad budget online in the next little while. How much of that will show up in MySpace? Not clear.
Blogging, I believe, is one of the best-use (maybe easiest) cases to support. There's the customer service angle (e.g., how Lionel Menchaca really shifted public opinion of Dell with the Direct2Dell blog). Bill Marriott (of the hotel world) keeps a decent blog.[196] There's a value to convincing companies to blog if they are willing to listen to a few suggestions:
Podcasting has some great applications, both in audio and video. The infrastructure and the production effort for both are inexpensive compared to traditional audio and video means. People are expecting more of a YouTube experience than a movie theater experience, and the more personal and direct the material, the better people relate. Businesses are learning how video can sweeten the experience. Take a look at Standout Jobs,[197] a company working heavily with video to create quality job recruiting and placement services.
Traditional media has flooded its way into podcasting. Check out the Apple iTunes store and you'll see it. Count in any section how many mainstream or mainstream-derivative products there are in the featured area compared to independents and you'll get an easy snapshot. Yet, for businesses, there's still a value there to pursue due to cheap production and cheap distribution opportunities.
Where does one put a corporate blogger? Marketing? IT? Customer service? Product development? It depends, yet that's a question when it comes down to figuring out payroll, HR, reporting structure, and what comes next. How does one measure the effectiveness of this? Oh, go ahead. Tell me you know. There are some numbers. Lionel Menchaca from Dell talked about the negative perception rating as a key metric tracked by Dell during his blogging efforts (which Lionel helped reduce some 30 percent or more).
Oh, and good luck asking for a resume that will include the appropriate background for this. Where do bloggers or community managers or podcasters show their experience? They can demonstrate their capabilities, but they can't exactly point to a past role (well, most can't) and say, "Here's where I shot video for Rocketboom."[198] Does this make it harder to recruit? And are there really HR teams out there looking for social media types, or is this coming straight from the product management skunkworks fund?
Here's a square-peg, round-hole situation. If you're the community manager, you're in a position where it's part customer service, part PR, part support, and part product development. You're at once the customer advocate and the rah-rah person for the company. And where do you get your training? To whom do you report? How does anyone give you a metric to cover what you do in a day.
If you're in the tech space, do you send your community manager to conferences? It's not business development. It's not lead generation (as such). Yet finance departments are receiving expense reports from people traveling to conferences just to do some brand exposure. How long will that last, if there's nothing to measure on the other end of it?
Starting to get the picture?
If you're looking at this from a "working with businesses" perspective, I have a few things to say. You're going to have to address all that stuff up top and a bunch more. You're going to have to know how to convince corporate IT departments to crack open parts of the firewall. You're going to have to help write job descriptions that explain what these jobs do for these businesses. You're going to have to get a whole lot less vague on the value you're bringing to the table as a thought leader and strategist in this space. You're not going to have an easy walk in the door of a not-so-Silicon-Valley place as a blogger or podcaster, so start upping your ante on skills and perspective.
There are tons. Tons. Just decide to take that blue pill. If you do, that's cool. There's lots of fun to be had in making media, communicating, sharing your voice, reaching out, and establishing new relationships. People do it all the time, and it matters.
If you're going to present yourself as a business professional showing the value of these tools to companies, step up your game. Do. Make. Learn. And build the appropriate human interface between what these businesses understand and what you're offering. It's there. You can do it. You have to be working at it from that perspective.