Social networking for a business
Recently we have been very involved in of course our plans for Claromentis 6.0 and all that will involve in terms of bringing web 2.0 into the corporate communication platform. This is really exciting.
At the same time we are being asked to design social networking platforms for companies, and this is really causing me to question the level of thought that the average UK company puts into these ventures from a business perspective.
Given the fact that these companies are basically SMEs and so are far from owning a global brand, they are normally not concerned with monitoring brands across social networks, which of course has significant value once you have a brand to protect and indeed leverage.
Instead what our SME clients are looking to do it to take advantage of a world that frankly, in my opinion, they don’t understand. They imagine that this is some low cost of entry platform to get themselves a significant audience to interact with.
The amazing thing is that it is!
But the approach needs to be very different from simply finding a way to interact with some massive and totally unrelated set of people on Facebook – or anywhere else.
Disconnected networks
So often the discussion starts with design, and how to make sure that people on “My new social network” will be able to easily find their previous friends from some “Other massive unconnected community” they belong to. We get a bunch of deign sketches, and minimal thought about the business and the potential consumers we might be able to reach.
In my view, and I am glad to say many others, “the way for a business to convert social networking into measurable revenue is to use the social networking approach to connect the business value of that company with unserved consumer needs”.
This means that significant effort for an average SME needs to go into determining exactly what the business value is that is appropriate for this medium, and how they can connect and interact with potential new consumers who share those values, but who are presently are either not customers or whose purchasing patterns can be influenced in a positive way.
Some of the people they reach in this new medium need to be empowered to become ambassadors through their genuine alignment with the brand – and so create momentum behind the network. They will be able to become innovators by interacting with the brand to create new value – or to extend the reach to geographies or verticals that the company previously was prevented from leveraging. That’s exciting.
What these new people will absolutely not be is some arbitrary ‘friend’ that technology makes it easy to log into something in which they have absolutely no interest at all.
Believe it or not they will just leave.
I definitely see trend of let’s ‘jump on the bandwagon’, if it works for others it might does the same on mine, but let’s not spend too much on this. Or I am seeing it as another ‘tick-in-a-box’ action without clear understanding what is it.
One of the key philosophies that Social Networking and Web2.0 brings to the business is democratisation of content creation. Information is no longer coming from an authorized channel and the realisation of great ideas can stem from the furthest corner in the organisation, and the freedom to express thoughts in a collaborative virtual space.
Some organisations might not ready for this but they don’t want to be branded ‘not-cool’.
The approach to social networking should be strategic. One must define a goal before getting their selves or their business to social networking.. Thanks for sharing this insightful post. Looking forward to reading other great posts.