The big question. Why use Social Media?

If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.

There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.

1. Reach out to existing customers
2. Tap into new customers
3. Promote your brand
4. Recruit new talent
5. Be “Cool”

While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now.  Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.

Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.

Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.

Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.

Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .

Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left  behind.

Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )

The most popular of these are of course:

1. Blogs
2. Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
3. Collaboration tools  (wiki’s )
4. Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
5. Podcasts

What makes this work investing in?

1. Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
2. Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
3. Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
4. Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
5. Recency :  One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
6. Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.

Advantages

The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.

It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )

There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being  gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.

Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.

These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.

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For those of you who didn’t know Google has an official channel on YouTube.

How NYC uses Google Maps and Google Earth

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If the reports at the NYTimes are accurate ( and they generally are ) it seems that YouTube might be signing a deal with the William Morris Agency ( a Hollywood Talent Agency ) that would put the company’s clients in web productions.

This would come as a great boost to up and coming actors as well as giving YouTube a means of generating ad revenue through their videos ( something they don’t do very much now due to the copyright concerns ) .

If statistics are anything to go by ( 100 million views in the United states alone ) this could become another cash cow for Google.

According to the NYTimes:

“A deal with William Morris would be a significant step in that direction. The agency represents a number of prominent clients like the actors Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe and the producers J. J. Abrams and Michael Bay. Last week, the company signed former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a client for potential book deals, speaking appearances and other projects.”

Interesting times ahead for sure….

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The Palm Pre is one of the most awaited products from Palm in a while. Seen an a contender to the Apple iPhone there has been a lot of news around this little device.
Some of the specifications of the phone as listed on their website.

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Apple will be releasing its latest installment of the iLife suite for ‘09.  The new features would include :

• Organizing and searching for phones using a face detection feature called Face ( iPhoto )
• Pictures can be uploaded directly to facebook.
• Garage Band to offer guitar and piano lessons ( a total of 18 )
• You can create themed slideshows
• iMovie has a video editor, stabilizer and animated travel maps.
• iWeb also gets an update with users being able to create websites with features like iSight, RSS and YouTube.

In a very interesting development users can now get lessons from experts like Fall Out Boy and Sting from the Garage Band store at $4.99 a lesson.

These upgrades are definitely going to be welcomed by users across the board.

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A report on Techcrunch states that Steve Jobs is back at work. With the speculations on how serious his health issues are its encouraging to read some positive news on that front.

Here is a video of Steve addressing the students at Stanford. Let’s focus on the positive for a bit

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

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The Vatican has launched it own channel on YouTube.

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=T1-OshJTkDM

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I know this is an old video but i just had to put it up.

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