In today's world, though, our friends, business contacts and our customers are likely to be widely spread: around the city, around the country or around the world. Perhaps because of this, what we now call social media has sprung up to allow us to create our own, virtual villages.
As a means of communication, social media has taken off in a very big way. Facebook now has 400 million active users, who spend a staggering total of 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Twitter reported earlier this year that new tweeters were signing up at the rate of 300,000 a day. LinkedIn, which is aimed primarily at professionals, has 65 million subscribers.
All of which is well and good, I hear you say, but surely Twitter is all about reporting what you had for breakfast, and Facebook is where you comment on pictures of your friends after a little too much merriment. That may once have been true, but today the situation is very different, and social media should be seen as a business tool.
The great benefit is that it is very dynamic and immediate. If you need to say something to your market, putting it on Twitter or Facebook means it reaches them, instantly. It becomes interactive, too, because - equally as instantly - you see the market response.
If you want to test the temperature of what you are doing or planning to do, this is an excellent approach. Customer needs change because they are affected by unexpected things, large and small. If you understand the reason behind the changed needs you are a major step towards being first to market with the solution.
If you need to say something to your market, putting it on Twitter or Facebook means it reaches them, instantly
It also gives you the ability to respond on a personal level. Social media pioneers tell the classic story of an American businessman whose flight was cancelled. He tweeted his frustration with the airline, another carrier picked up the message and replied telling him that there was a free seat on their next flight on the route which was being held in his name. The traveller got home, and the alert airline picked up another loyal traveller.
The immediacy of social media is a clear benefit, but it is also a challenge in business. Just as your customers and competitors will respond quickly to your messages, so they will look to you to respond to theirs with the same degree of urgency. So it means a big investment in time, to monitor services and keep the conversations on track.
Another double-edged sword is that a successful social media presence can say a great deal about your business's core values by the personality it presents online. Get it right and you can build brand loyalty; get it wrong and, as with tardy responses, you can turn customers away. It is up to you to judge how much time you can invest in building the networks and monitoring the feeds, but I would urge you to do it.
Technology is there to help you. Find a platform that does the tracking for you, spotting mentions of you (and your competitors) on Twitter, Facebook and the rest. These software tools will allow you to set up alarms for good and bad interactions. It means you are collecting and analysing market data in real time, which must be valuable to any business.
Google and other search engines are also tracking the social media, so by being active you push yourself up the rankings, helping new prospects and others to find your business, rather than a competitor's. As a research tool it adds depth, because you not only find a tractor dealership in Beirut (or whatever you are looking for), but you know how that company's customers feel about it.
If the idea of social media in a business context seems alien to you, I urge you to try it. Share thoughts when you have them. Make special offers, ask questions and engage your customers. Most of all, build a community around your company and what you do. Remember, just a couple of years ago the dullest commercials on television were for financial comparison websites. Then one broke the mould and introduced a puppet meerkat with an improbable Russian accent. Today, Aleksandr the meerkat, has three quarters of a million friends on Facebook: this is brand loyalty which we would all love to have.
The Entrepreneurs' Forum was established by the Information Technologists' Company to provide a strong pro-bono mentoring team to help new and growing businesses as they search for business investment. For more information and registration at www.itcmentoring.eventbrite.com [0]