.Roaring Mouse

With the recent surge in interest in social media*, I thought that this would be an opportune time to explore social media in more depth from a small business perspective. Yes, there are other treatments of the subject, even notably from our competition, but I thought I’d take a look at social media marketing from a slightly different perspective. Where possible, I’ll try to relate it to traditional business practices by drawing analogies to the way business has been done for ages. As we dive deeper into the topic, I hope to uncover additional uses for the social media tools that exist today beyond that which are already popular prescription. My hope is that this series of posts will culminate in a solid social media marketing guide that draws upon one of the promised positives of social media – the wisdom of crowds.

The natural starting point is a description of what social media is. There is an uber-geeky Wikipedia definition here, but I far prefer the simple, context-sensitive definition provided by the great folks at Duct Tape Marketing.

“Social media is the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value”

In practical terms, social media as we know it today equates to web-based tools and services such as blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter) , social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), media sharing sites (YouTube for video, Flickr for photos),  podcasting, social bookmarking (del.icio.us), social content aggregators (digg.com) and vlogs (video blogs).  One or all of these tools can help you increase your presence and relevance in the social media space. In order to make effective use of these tools, though, it is important to first understand a very fundamental tenet of social media.

Where social media differs *significantly* from your traditional web presence is that it is a medium where your customers are actively engaged. Information is now multi-directional and in many cases, shared in real time. This changes the nature of your company’s web presence from a static website to a web presence that is highly dynamic. Through social media, customers can interact with you more fluidly, more rapidly and more personally.  This provides many opportunities to gauge your company’s performance and to find out how customers feel about your products and services. It also allows you to perform market research somewhat anonymously or broadcast marketing communications to your customers expediently at relatively low cost.

Naturally, there are potential downsides to social media tools. Anything your company states can be re-broadcast or shared with a large number of people quickly. This, of course presents a new set of challenges. Before the advent of social media, a mistake on a website could be repaired and over time, forgotten. The impact would probably be limited to the customers who saw the mistake and not many other people. A gaffe through a social media channel, on the other hand, may have far more severe implications, given its kinetic nature. This calls for a thoughtful, sound approach to your social media strategy, which of course, requires a good understanding of what can go wrong. One of the goals of this study is to create a set of ’social media best practices’ that everybody can benefit from. That means that I will explore what TO DO, as well as what NOT to do when it comes to using social media effectively.

I personally believe that a social media presence and strategy will soon be the de facto standard when it comes to a company’s web presence. I hope that this study and exploration of the subject and of the individual tools I listed above will be of benefit to you as you embark upon your own social media journey. To those of you who are far more experienced in the subject than me, I make the humble request that you share your experiences and insight in order that all of us will benefit from the collective wisdom.

In Social Media in Small Business #2, I will explore Twitter, the famous micro-blogging engine.

* This really isn’t an empirical claim, but merely based on the fact that my 62 year old mother on the other side of the world now has a Facebook account and invited me to be her friend. I accepted, yes, but not before pondering some interesting philosophical questions at great length. She ‘poked’ me after I accepted and no, I won’t respond in kind.