Using Social Media For Business Use

By Ron de Giusti

Background: How my morning coffee has changed …

It used to be that I would pour my morning coffee and then sit back and watch the morning news on TV or surf news on the web. Now I still have my morning coffee, but I read blog posts instead and then interact with those posts either by commenting or re-tweeting those posts to Twitter. The key thing to note here is that I have gone from passively viewing and reading my one-to-many mediums (TV and internet news) to interacting with many-to-many mediums (blog-posts with comments, Twitter, Digg).

Hasn’t this always been the promise?

We have been told for the longest time that the internet was revolutionary in that it was not a passive medium (i.e., you interact with it as opposed to passively sitting in front of your television). But, it truly has not been until the significant uptick in social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs) use in the prior year, 2009, that the general internet community has moved away from passive use. The net is finally delivering on its message.

Delivering on social media for corporate use

OK, so you get-it that social media is being used because even your parents are on Facebook; but, is it just a great big corporate time-suck or does all this web 2.0 social media stuff have a corporate use? And the answer is: Yes, of course it has a corporate use.

I want to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement: SOCIAL MEDIA HAS ALWAYS EXISTED AND CORPORATIONS HAVE ALWAYS USED IT.

So, before I go on and explain how social media has always existed I guess I’d better define what ’social media’ is first. Social media is the act of having many-to-many conversations as opposed to one-to-many (e.g., TV) or one-to-one (e.g., phone call). Today the tools for these many-to-many conversations are Twitter, Facebook, etc. In the past these many-to-many conversations were limited to the pub after work or perhaps in company lunch rooms. Another example of many-to-many conversations already taking place in the corporate world are when marketing agencies offer companies focus groups with round table discussions about their product or service in order to garner feedback.

Today, the new tools of social media mean that our many-to-many conversations reach a much wider audience right out of the gate. And, the responses of those conversations can be captured in unstructured data that can be analyzed with fantastic new analytic tools that have only recently appeared.

What are the examples of corporate use of social media?

There are many (remember, you simply have to think of a many-to-many conversation that would add value for a corporation). One use of social media may be for employee feedback to the HR department where the HR department host a SharePoint site to solicit comments and feedback. Another use might be for a mechanic company where mechanics can tweet out questions to their other fellow mechanics about how to solve some unique problem they have encountered in the field. The list really could go on and on.

Has your company implemented social media tools? And if so, are you seeing an uptick in customer and employee interactions?