Are you missing the Social Media Boat?

Traditionally you’ve only shown the world your business face, a face that you’ve taken time and effort to prepare. The make up’s been applied and possibly some airbrushing has taken place before you’ve taken that picture to be displayed on your company web site.

Today just your face isn’t good enough; the world wants to see behind the gloss, they want to get to know the real you they want to hear your beating heart and see your soul and with the advent of social media they can because even if you’re not opening yourself up, someone else most probably is; it may be a competitor or a disgruntled ex-customer or it could be an ex-employee, business partner etc. etc…So…what do you do?

Are you ready to allow that level of intimacy? Where do you begin?

Well hopefully not like some people that I met while in Spain, earlier on this month. The beginning of the month saw a big leisure industry conference on the Costa del Sol.  Now normally I wouldn’t have gone but on its second day an industry speaker was going to be talking about ‘Social Networks’ – …how can the industry tap into social media opportunities…

So I had to go; the conference candidates recognised that Social Media offered a great deal of opportunities to their industry and I did hear of some good use of the platforms but overall it left me feeling…this is what came to my mind:-

Go back before the advent of television, when radio was king. You turned on the radio and heard a company’s jingle selling you soap…

The television comes along and the same company thinks great! and puts the same advert on TV, exactly the same…purely audio.

Would you say that this soap company had missed the true potential of the extra benefits that television could deliver?

It’s just the way I felt, at the conference, when I heard that a slick video from the leisure resort would be more powerful than a grainy video uploaded by a customer complimenting the said leisure resort…someone was missing the boat!

The only benefit that this decision offered was to reduce the cost of pushing information out.

The true potential of social media remains its’ power to engage audiences and have the audience exhibit your wares.  The ability to engage with the outside world in real time two way communication and use this knowledge to deliver customer experiences that are not what the customer wanted but what the customer is wanting now! (Not an exhaustive list).

Business:   ‘So Mr. X, here is my product, based on expensive research done 12 months ago that was defined through a marketing strategy six months ago which resulted in this product at the a price that was set at…’

Mr.X:        ‘My preferences changed three months ago…shame your expensive research wasn’t done then…’

So my question is…

Are you missing the Social Media Boat?!