- Everybody talks about social media but do we understand what the concept means?
- What is social media measurement?
- Before you start measuring social media efforts, make sure you focus these efforts.
- Remember, doing a good job while building brand and reputation takes many more resources than you first might think.
Social media can be defined as follows:
- “Social media are online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author. To do this, they use social software that enables anyone without knowledge of coding, to post, comment on, share or mash up content and to form communities around shared interests.”
2008-04-08 What is social media? by Joseph Thornley
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We want to refine the above a bit and expand the definition in order to make it even more obvious what the term entails, namely:
- Social media take advantage of tools and techniques that facilitate participatory communication, whereby the user can move back and forth easily between audience and author.Software and tools used for social media efforts enables people with limited programming or technical skills to focus on participating, connecting and sharing information and insights with other people.
As the above indicates, social media includes corporate blogging and is quite new for many marketers. Hence it occupies a niche outside corporate public relations or PR.
What is it about?
Social media measurement may focus on velocity, engagement, conversation, participation, community or some combination. Nevertheless, it is difficult to put a euro and cent sticker on this.
What it comes down to is your your target group and how you intend to reach them. An investor relations blog is surely not the same as one for financial analysts on Wall Street. Neither can a Chief Executive’s blog focus on financial analysts and customers as well as employees. Nevertheless, all three groups may share an interest to hear about the new products that the corporation intends to bring to the marketplace within the next 6 months or so.
Naturally, customers want to know about the latest features that the product will offer and when it will be in stores. In contrast, analysts want to know how this will affect key financial indicators and retail shareholders focus on dividends. Nevertheless, all three stakeholder groups want to know about the firm’s product pipeline because it affects them all in one way or another. Hence, focusing on the product pipeline as part of your social media efforts might not be such a bad idea.
Is it worth the investment?
That all depends on what you wish to accomplish.
The question is if your executive can spare 5 hours a week or not. It might take her 2.5 hours to write a good post and another 2.5 hours to keep up with what is happening in social media (e.g., respond to the comments, watch the conversation and so on).
blogging takes time – more than you think
Hence, using social media for your corporation takes time and resources. Without a clear purpose, don’t even start. It is too costly if you are an SME (small and medium enterprise) unless you figured out what it will do for your bottom line. In turn, focus on the latter and it will most likely be worth every cent.
TIDBIT
Andy Warhol is being attributed of having said that in future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. I think he was wrong. In future everybody will have a 15-minute webcast or a blog with 3-5 posts each week. But no one will want to watch or read it.
So make sure, if you put a webcast up or blog every week, make it worth the time and effort for your target audience to either watch the video clip or read your post. Failure here means you have wasted valuable resources, something you cannot afford.
As any risky venture, social media can result in failure if not a disaster but success means you are getting a huge payoff.
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