This document discusses how businesses can use various social media tools like blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and video/photo sharing sites for communication, collaboration, marketing and customer feedback. It outlines the key benefits of social media like low cost, timely information sharing, brand recognition and web traffic. While social media provides opportunities, it also has drawbacks like lack of anonymity and being time consuming. The document concludes by giving an example of how a company called Journeyman International uses social media tools like their website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
3. Types of Social Media Communication Blogs Micro Blogging Social Networking Collaboration Wikis Presentation Sharing Multimedia Video Sharing Livecasting Reviews Product/ Business Review Q&A
How many of you have used a social media?What types of social media do you use?How many of you believe you will use social media in the market place?
IntroductionSocial networking is a broad term that refers to the building of online communities based on common interests and activities. What started out as a way to use the ‘Net to make friends and meet romantic partners' has Overwhelminglymoved into the business world.
In order to use social media we need to know more about it. Social media can take many different forms and functions such asCommunicationBlogs: Blogs are websites with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material Micro blogging:A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in file size. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of contentEx:Foursquare,Tumblr, Twitter,Google Buzz Social networking:is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building social networks or social relations among people, who share interests and/or activities.Ex: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Collaboration Wikis:is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via aweb browser Ex: Wikia, Wikimedia Wikispaces Presentation sharing:is a web based platform that allows multiple people to work on one document simultaneouslyEx:,SlideShare, Google docsMultimedia Video sharingis a website that allows individuals to upload video and have others watch. This is mainly used by businesses to advertise.Ex: sevenload, Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube, Openfilm Presence and Livecasting:is a website that allows one to communicate face to face with another any where in the world Ex.: Livestream, Skype, Stickam, Ustream, blip.tvReviews and opinionsare websites where one can talk about a certain product and business and where those businesses can review what is said about there product and business Responding to Product reviews: Ex: epinions.com, MouthShut.com Business reviews: Ex:Customer Lobby, Yelp
Key Elements of Social NetworkingCost:Free or cost effective internet marketing strategy that can create viral resultsInformation access: Blogs and other social media have the ability to track information about potential clients, customer reviews, and other real time data. Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.38% of bloggers post brand or product reviewsTimeliness: Immediately.Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million. The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.Reach - both industrial and social media technologies provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience. LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.Accessibility - the means of production for industrial media are typically owned privately or by government; social media tools are generally available to anyone. Face book claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
With all these options, which one do you use for which purpose?As a business owner social media has the answer for each business situation.If your sales department needs a place to find more customers and your HR department needs more qualified employees.As a business owner your solution is LinkedIN, FacebookIf you want to know what the public is saying about your business or productSolution: Digg, RedditIf you want a place to post content and build more web trafficSolution: You tube, Stumble uponIf I want to communicate my knowledge and goals to my employeesSolution: create a blog, twitter
Presence:Your business will gain exposure not through your own advertisements, but through folks who’ve already been patrons. People want to learn about products through their friends and people they trust.Feed back:, rapid feedback and insight from consumers provide a mechanism for executives to assess consumer opinion and use this information to improve products, customer service and perception. This allows engaged enterprises to be on top of any changes that may be needed and to proactively make appropriate adjustments to strategies, products or services. Marketing:. Given its ease of use and its ability to reach large populations almost instantly, social media is becoming a powerful force in the way businesses reach, attract and engage their customers, employees and other stakeholders. with some companies actively promoting employee involvement to raise awareness of their products or services and keep in touch with each other and existing or potential customers. Collaboration: Tools that allow people to meet and share documents, give presentations, and so forth. This can include text, video, audio, and other combinations of functions.Communications: Intramural blogging has become a favored way for many executives to communicate with employees, as have YouTube-style video on demand platforms. IM serves a more immediate, person-to-person communications role, useful for on-the-fly communications. Access to expertise: Facebook-style platforms allow (and encourage) employees to post information about themselves, their experience, and their skills. Because these are highly interactive, content can be pushed to people who have indicated specific interests. The ability to search for and communicate with potential employees is another area that has seen great enhancement via sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo
Lack of AnonymityYou are putting out information about your name, location, age, gender, and many other types of information that you may not want to let others know. Most people would say be careful, but no one can be certain at any given time. As long as people can know who you exactly are, then some can find ways to do you in.Scams and HarassmentThere is a potential for failure of security in both personal and business context. While many sites apply certain measures to keep any of these cases of harassment, cyber-stalking, online scams, and identity theft to an absolute minimum, you still may never know. Employees personal pages make company look badEmployees tweet wrong views of the companyTime ConsumingIf this is not your kind of thing, that it would just be a waste of time for you. The key to social networking is that it is supposed to be fun, whether you are just doing it for kicks or clicking around for business purposes. That should be reasonable enough for anyone, but there are those people who don't see the point. For them, it can be a disadvantage.