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Notas del editor
Hello and welcome to the Northwestern Technologies and Social Media presentation. Some of you may not know what social media is or how it can make a giant impact on the success of your company. By the time this presentation is done you will have a much greater understanding on all of these questions and more. Thank you all for being here and; Let’s get started shall we?
Today we are going to talk about the definition of social media and what it means for you. We will have a very brief history lesson followed by how social media impacts the business world. Then we will go through some benefits that implanting social media will give to Northwestern Technologies to make your already strong organization even more of a presence around the globe. We will also take a look at how affordable implementing social media into your marketing strategies will be. Then we will go over some ways to get started so that Northwestern Technologies can use some great techniques and resources to make a powerful start. Finally, because it’s a lot of information in a short time, we will wrap up with a conclusion of the key points that we discuss in the presentation. Again, I thank you all for coming, it’s time to jump right in.
According to Merriam-Webster social media is: forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos) (Merriam-Webster, 2014)To put that definition into more layman's terms, Social Media is basically communicating with companies or others in a real time or close to real time manner on the internet. This can be in the form of social network sites such as Facebook or on blogging sites, gaming sites that are real time, Twitter, YouTube, and so much more. Basically it is any kind of a “chatting” platform where you can interact with your “friends” to build your companies product reputation.
In 1971 the first e-mail was delivered and in 1978 the first bulletin board system was invented by two Chicago hobbyists. This bullet board system was used much in the same way as we use social media today. It was used for announcements, to tell of meetings, talk to friends and so on. By the late 1980’s internet service providers were popping up and making the internet more than an “in house” operation. In 1989 a British engineer by the name of Tim Berners-Lee began working on what would become the World Wide Web. He worked for a company called Cern and in 1993 this company donated the technology to the world. 1997 seem to be the year when social media on the internet really took off. The web was up to one million web sites, blogging started, AOL had instant messenger going, and a site called SixDegrees.com had users using friends lists and profiles. In 2004 Yelp launched and now businesses have a place to put their hours and get customer reviews that are seen by the public eye. In the mid 2000’s everything started to happen for business concerning social media. Facebook started allowing networks for companies, twitter was being used for customer service, YouTube would place a company’s ad beside the same kind of content the user was looking for, and even Google launched pages for businesses creating yet another platform on Google plus. Here it is 2014 and it looks like the social media platform for business is here to stay and just keeps getting stronger as we go.
There are some great benefits that come from your company being social media savvy. One big one is brand recognition. Brand recognition comes from repeat exposure as we all know. When you have a whole community talking about Northwestern Technologies it becomes a household name like Pepsi for instance. This will make your business an authority on software solutions because it will be the first business that comes to mind when the subject is brought up. Some of the more successful social media business users generate a bunch of traffic that ends up “traveling” on over to your corporate website that leads to sales. You will also have a competitive advantage over companies that are just not there yet with social media. This will give you influence over those companies because anymore it’s a big let-down when we look for companies on the internet and can’t find them in social media or even on a web site. When people look for the authority on whatever they are after, they tend to go for the companies that are the most talked about and the most accessible. One last point I would like to make about the benefits is that with all of this good exposure for your company, and your customers and potential customers talking to you on a more personal level will gain their trust and loyalty to your company. Because you are “friends” with your customers and potential ones, like any friendship, trust is harder to break.
Most of the social media platforms are free to use. Traditional media as we all know can get very expensive very quickly with television, radio, and newspaper ads. Basically you will still need staff to keep up to date with your social media, but the cost is still a fraction of traditional advertising. Even the promotions that Northwestern Technologies may want to provide such as video’s or articles can be done at very little cost compared to putting it on TV or the radio.I don’t want to say that there are no costs at all. There will be costs of either having an outside contractor help you set up and run your social media campaign, or the cost of your inside staff starting and running this campaign. Either way it is not completely free, but it is definitely a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
In a nut shell this is how it works: make friends and keep them talking. (Facinelli, 2009) You will want your web blog or web pages to be a little more “hip” than your existing corporate web site. The reason why is that you want it to be a little less professional and more personal to all of your new “friends”. You want to build a strong community that trusts you and knows you care about them. Don’t get me wrong, you still want to keep the integrity of the company while you are building your new found friends, but you do want them to feel like your company personally cares about them by returning tweets or answering blogs, or anything that keeps them up to date. After you have a little community of friends built you will have to have a plan in place to keep them talking such as; promotional events, brag a little about your greatest new product, answer their questions, give them positive feedback and anything else that you can think of to keep them “chatting”.
Here are the basic four straightforward steps to starting a social media campaign. Decide on products or services that you want to promote on line. These could be the same as what you have on your web site. Then you need to decide on your desired outcomes. This could be anything from generating more traffic, to becoming an authority, or boosting your online sales. Then you need define your target market so that you know where to focus building relationships and trust. Finally you want to decide what types of social networks will suit your companies needs the most. For example, Northern Technologies would not want their target audience to be a blog about fishing; your company may find your target audience in a different blog about software development, or software for businesses. Once you have your plan together, you are on your way to be successful in your social media campaign.
I think that we have learned a few key points about how Northwestern Technologies needs to have a social media platform added to their advertising campaign. I hope that you all take away from this presentation how vital adding social media to your campaign is. We learned that since social media’s birth until now social media is here to stay. It has done nothing but grown. We learned about all the great benefits social media has to offer a company like Northwestern Technologies. We also figured out that it is truly very affordable. We found out that it’s almost as simple as making friends, and that all we have to do to maintain it is to keep up to date. We did learn a little about how to get started also. I would now like to take this opportunity to thank you all for attending this presentation and look forward to hearing from you soon.
