All Things Social

I attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference last week and had a great time meeting Social experts and attending sessions to learn more about the latest and greatest concepts and ideas around Social media. While I was on the trade show floor manning our booth for most of the initial 3 days, I was able to attend a couple of sessions. On Saturday morning I attended a session that was hosted by Erik Qualman, who wrote the book Socialnomics and also created a great video that really puts Social Media into perspective.

His "Book Reading" session focused on his book and the video above, but he did mention something that really struck home with me.

In the past, people were focused on Word-of-Mouth - people were talking about you, telling their friends about your brand. Before you know it, a lot of people are talking about you, your product, your service, whatever it may be. But as a brand, you did not know what they were saying, or if the message was consistent. Erik compared this to the game of telephone. If you create a message and tell it to the 1st person, odds are that by the time that it reaches the 5th, 10th, 20th person, the message has changed, or distorted over time. Is that something you are prepared to let happen?

With the amount of people that are online now, people are talking about everything. Simple searches can result in endless conversations and links to very informative information, but as a brand, are you creating a consistent message about your brand? 1 out of every 4 search results for the top 20 brands results in Social content.

Are you ready to build up a presence within external Social Networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr...) in order to create a consistent message that others can share with one another, and build a "hub" where others can point to for information? Are you then cross-promoting your website within those external platforms and pointing your audience back to your website? Once your audience gets to your website, are you providing a pervasive web experience to them?

When you think about Social Media, or just getting involved in Social aspects of the internet, it is not just about creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It is about creating a holistic vision of how your audience can learn from you and how you can learn from them. It is about listening to what is being said and interacting with those that are saying it. It is also about taking the data and giving it to the right people at the right time so that better decisions can be made to improve the business.

My recommendation is to start slow and build upon your early success when it comes to Social interactions, because once you start, it is very difficult to stop.