Social Media Insights from IBM
Ed Brill, who heads up Social Media at IBM was on the Noon Business Hour at WBBM Radio yesterday. What he said bears repeating and is often the point that is hardest for most people to understand. The benefit of social media is the ENGAGEMENT. Don’t broadcast. Engage your customers, partners and suppliers in conversations. Social media is a vehicle to be in touch with customers in a transparent way.
Your reasons for using social media may vary. Market research, sales, customer service, recruiting, fundraising or all of the above may be useful. I know one major hotel brand is now beginning to emphasize social media primarily for reputation management.
In one of my presentations, I have a slide with a graphic on it that shows social media going back decades (actually centuries). Every example is about communication. And the social media we think of today involves using recent technology to make more conversations possible, with more people in more locations.
While we now have the ability to post written words, videos, pictures, audio and links, that just adds to the awesomeness of engagements or conversations, not unlike back in the old days – like the 1990′s. Or 1970′s. Or 1940s. IBM’s computers were awesome back then as they are today, with more capability, obviously. And like Big Blue, things have evolved in social media over the past century.
Social Media Case Study
I set up the social media strategy for a client which included Twitter, Facebook and a blog. I trained the sales staff to Tweet from conferences they attended, which brought more visibility to my client and opened up new in-person meetings – conversations – while they were at the actual meeting. Valuable! They began following conferences they attended by following the hashtags of those conferences, which build their brand awareness considerably!
They began following and engaging people using the hashtags of conferences they weren’t attending, which also resulted in more visibility, new contacts and learning from those who tweeted snippets of content. All from the comfort of their cubicle…or living room.
They are now participating in chats on subjects of interest to their target segments. Again, more awareness, engagement and continuing education.
One of the most important strategies of the blog is to feature short bios of each member of the sales team. People Google people they become aware of or are going to meet. Having them land on the blog post of the featured employee is great for two reasons:
- It allows you to serve up whatever information you deem most important to foster a professional engagement. (I could do a whole post on that alone!) It will help make the prospect desire to know more and meet.
- It gets your prospect in your neighborhood. Once they’re on your blog, they can experience all kinds of content about you organization, staff, products or services.
Get started. Revise later.
Ed also suggested that you set up Google Alerts to keep track of any mentions that appear online. I will add that you should also add alerts for your products, key employees and competitors. Whether you’re just starting out or primarily just concerned with reputation management, as cited above, listening to your market is often your best first step. People are talking about you right NOW! Do you know what they’re saying? I wrote more about this in How to Set Up a Social Media Listening Station. By the way that’s one of my most popular speaking topics.
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