Wednesday, 27 January 2010 10:56

Social Media, (not) for everyone?!

Written by Dorte Knights-Branch
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Maybe this is wrong to admit, but actually I didn’t think social media was for every one at all! I thought there was a lot of weight behind the often posed question “how will this really benefit a corporate business?” but, cheesy as it may sound, after doing a one day taster course with Caron Lyon from CRM Creative I was actually converted!

The magic words

I fact, I suppose Sue Hallam had done a bit of the ground work for my conversion at the Online Marketing Conference in December by the words “think about what you currently do and then use Social Media to do it better” (or something along those lines).

The revolutionising moment was realising that “Social media” isn’t about being on Facebook with 400 of my closest friends. Social media is just a new way of presenting my current content and data, with the added bonus of more people viewing it than before - bonus!

These really are for everyone

This isn’t all new to everyone and just like a lot of the other things we do, it is very simple! But these are some of the “Social media” that we really do think is for everyone:

  • YouTube We now put all our video on YouTube – this even saves us space on our own hosting, excellent!
  • SlideShare We now put all our presentations and slideshows on SlideShare.com – again saves us space but even better it actually presents much better than what we did before, excellent!
  • Issuu For sites with lots of pdf materials, Issuu is a great alternative! Again, it presents much better than you old boring “down load pdf here” and can really add to the user experience, excellent!
  • PodCast We spend quite a bit of time videoing people and find that their initial reaction to being on camera is much less Hollywood than we would like. However, doing a Podcast is much less intimidating and the other advantage is that people are actually really tuning into listening to these short sharp snippets online, excellent!

But will it generate any business?

Well, overnight it probably won’t double your business, but we can say that from our experience we are getting people come to our monthly eBusiness Champions events who have heard about us via Twitter. The Axis Centre are getting delegates to the courses who have heard about them on Twitter, and there are lots of these stories about, so can you really risk ignoring this trend?

What to do next?

Now go and look at your business and web site, where could you improve the user experience by replace current content with much better presented “Social media enabled” content?

Has anyone got good or bad experiences with any of these already, let us know?

back to top