7 reasons for social media or …

… what to tell your boss

Perhaps you know the situation?

You want your company to use facebook or twitter, but the CEO or marketing manager thinks that social media is a waste of time.

“Why should we waste time and money on Facebook? We don’t have time to keep up with what customers are saying. We do not have time to respond to blogs.”

Hmmm .. I’ve heard this many times.

Let me tell you a secret – which is not really a secret. Social media is here to stay. And you might as well start to use them. Remember when marketers thought about the internet in the 90s –  just something for IT freaks? .

And here is another secret – within very very short time, the website as we know it today is gone. Users will have the rights to comment on what they read and see. This is like going from print to web.

eMarketer expects in 2010 that BtB industry spending will increase by 60 percent. Okay – your bossis still screaming ?

Well here are 7 good reasons for companies to be on social media.

1. We all want to involve our customer in our company and products. To involve customers we have to get a dialogue with the customer right? Could you imagine that you involve yourself privately with someone with an one-way dialogue? No. Involvement requires dialogue. Social media is dialogue.
2. “We do not have time to read what it says on our blog and Facebook”. Wow – I’ll tell you a secret. Those who write to you on your blog are either customers or potential customers. They have taken their time to write to you. Don’t you have the time for customers?
3. Maybe they write negative things about your company and you don’t know what to do about that. Well whether you have a blog or your customers may comment on your pages – they will write about you. Maybe on their private blogs or Facebook. When customers comment on your page you can enter into dialogue with customers and heard some negative things too. But hey – the customers can actually point out important problems which must be addressed.
4. The cost to get started with social media is low. It is free to open a Facebook page, a twitter account, etc. The biggest cost is the time consumption afterwards.
5. Most companies writes in their strategy that they wanna be  leading, innovative, dynamic – well now is your chance there.
6. Social media is a whole new channel in your marketing portfolio. And yes you need it –  some of your competitors are using it so you will have to use it too – or loose customers to your competitors.
7. You can dramatically increase traffic on your website using social media. The importents of links are very very high in seaches such as Google. With social media you can spread your links out and get many backlinks to your website. Your boss knows that traffic is money?

Social media is not only Facebook and twitter. Social media could be..

Microblogging (Twitter)
Photo sharing (Flickr)
Video sharing (YouTube)
Social bookmarking (Digg)
Wikis (Wikipedia)
Podcasts (iTunes)
Social communities (Facebook, MySpace)

So kick your boss in the ass and lets get this going ..

Yours
Henrik