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Why Companies are Afraid of Social Media

August 4, 2011 By 2 Comments

“We don’t do social media, because people might say bad things about us,” the executive said. “If we have a Facebook page, people might leave negative comments on it.”

“They’re already saying bad things about you,” I said. “Whether you’re on it or not, people are complaining about you, and they’re telling as many of their friends as they can.”

The rest of the conversation went as expected. Reason after reason. Excuse after excuse. We’re not on social media because. . .  we don’t do social media because we. . . it’s only for young people. . .

In No Bullshit Social Media, we listed 28 different reasons companies are afraid of using social media: no money, no experience, no guaranteed results, we’ve never done it that way before, yada yada yada.

There are any number of reasons why companies are afraid, and there are only a few reasons why they shouldn’t be. But these reasons trump all the excuses any business can ever come up with.

1) Social media is not going away. It’s not a fad. It’s not something we’ll forget about. Social media has been brewing for the last 30 years, when Compuserve and Prodigy started as community bulletin boards. Or even before that when real computer bulletin boards were introduced in the 1970s. Companies may come and go, but real-time communication isn’t going anywhere.

2) Social media has gained wide acceptance faster than any other medium. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners; television took 13 years to get 50 million viewers. Facebook, on the other hand, added 100 million users in 9 months. Social media is only going to grow and get a stronger foothold in the way we communicate and receive information and news.

3) Social media is inexpensive. Facebook is free, Twitter is free, blogging is free, assuming you’ve got the time and knowledge to use it. If you don’t, you can hire people to manage it for you. It’s no different from hiring in-house or outsourced professionals to manage your TV ads, your websites, and your trade shows. The only difference is once you hire social media people, your overhead is mostly finished; the tools don’t cost anything to operate.

If you hire someone to produce your TV ads, there’s still the costs of actually creating them, and then buying the airtime. You can hire people to manage your trade shows, but you still have to pay the added costs of booth space and rentals, going there, working it, and coming home. Plus expenses.

4) Social media marketing can be measured. One big difference between social media marketing and regular marketing is that we can measure social media marketing through tools like Google Analytics and SocialMention.com (both free) and Radian6 and Vocus (both paid services).

How do you measure a billboard? How do you know how many people drove by, read it, and bought your product? How do you measure a TV commercial? How do you know how many people actually sat through the entire commercial and bought as a direct result? How many walked away after 20 seconds? 10 seconds? How many people never even saw it because they changed the channels?

With social media, we can tell who read a blog post, clicked a link, and then made a purchase. Mainstream media can give you estimates and guesses, but they can’t actually count. Social media can tell you how long someone watched a video or visited a website, when they clicked away, and where they went. Mainstream media can only guess at the numbers of viewers, listeners, and readers.

Social media marketing isn’t going away. And while it seems like everybody is using it, there are still hundreds of thousands of businesses that haven’t even considered it. It’s not too late to start. It’s not too late to create a Twitter account or a blog, and then talk directly to, and hear directly from, your customers. There’s nothing to be afraid of, and there are plenty of people to help you get through the rough spots.

Erik Deckers is the co-author of Branding Yourself: Using Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, and most recently, the co-author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. He is co-owner of Professional Blog Service, a ghost blogging and social media consulting agency in Indianapolis.

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    Filed Under: Billboards, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Marketing, No Bullshit Social Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Television, Traditional Media Tagged With: , , , ,

    “My Customers Don’t Use Social Media” and Other Lame Excuses

    October 29, 2010 By 2 Comments

    Fellow social media pro Jay Baer, and author of The Now Revolution, is busting some social media myths with his latest post, Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media. Jay Baer

    My favorite busted myth was “My Customers Don’t Use Social Media”. I hear that one a lot from businesspeople.

    “That’s interesting,” I said to a business person once. “How do you know?”

    “Well, because I don’t use it,” said this otherwise-intelligent business owner.

    I wanted to say, “You drive a sedan. Does that mean all your customers buy sedans? You have two kids. Do all your customers have two kids?” But I didn’t, because I’m a nice guy.

    However, had I known what Jay knows, I would have instead offered some pretty interesting statistics instead:

    According to the recent Social Technographics® report from Forrrester, 81% of U.S. adults with an Internet connection use social media in some form or function. Further, last year’s Forrester study of B2B technology buyers found that they use social media nearly twice as much as U.S. adults overall.

    In other words, if 67% of US homes have broadband access,, 81% of them are on a social network, or 54.27% of people with broadband access are on a social network.

    That’s half your customers, half your vendors, half your competitors. And if social media is so cheap to use, and your competitors are already on there, they’re reaching your vendors and your customers more efficiently, more frequently, and more effectively than you are.

    Don’t assume that just because you don’t use social media means that the rest of your customers are waiting to join social networks until you do. Just because you do or don’t do something doesn’t mean your customers will follow suit.

    If you want more proof, Jay recommended that you take your customer email list, and see which of them are active on different social media accounts by using Flowtown or Gist.

    Another way to see whether your customers are using social media is to do the following:

    1. Create a new Gmail account with your company name or your name. (You should do this if you’re trying Flowtown or Gist too.)
    2. Upload your entire customer list to Gmail. (Don’t worry, your original is still safe.) Merge any duplicates.
    3. Create a Twitter account (Twitter.com) or LinkedIn account.
    4. You’ll be prompted to import your email list to see which of your contacts are on that network. Follow those instructions and connect your Gmail account.
    5. Start connecting with/following anyone in your list.

    Those are the people who are using Twitter and LinkedIn. My guess is that at least 25% of your list will be found on those two networks, and possibly more.

    So why aren’t you communicating with your customers on this channel? It’s cheaper than any advertising or trade shows. It’s more effective than traditional marketing. It targets your audience better than direct mail. It’s new enough that people are still paying attention to it. And it’s got enough acceptance that it’s not going away.

    Basically, if you think your customers don’t use this because you don’t like it, you’re making a big mistake. Social media is not going to go away, and it’s only going to get bigger. People said the same thing about the Internet, computers in the workplace, fax machines, and telephones. But newer, more technologically-daring companies are willing to try these things, and they’re going to leave you in the dust.

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      Filed Under: Blogging, Lead Generation, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools Tagged With: , , , ,

      Social Media is Flat for Small Business Adoption

      October 20, 2010 By 5 Comments

      The recent survey from Marketing Profs (Small Biz Report: Social Media Adoption Levels Off) makes me wonder if corporations are starting to catch up to small businesses in the area of social media, or if small businesses are slacking off. (Disclosure: Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley is writing the forward to Kyle Lacy’s and my book, Branding Yourself).

      The wave of social media adoption has tapered off: 24% of small businesses now use social media, the same level recorded six months earlier. Among them, 82% use Facebook, 38% use LinkedIn, and 30% use Twitter.

      Among small business owners who use social media, 73% have a company page (down from 75% six months earlier), 65% post status updates (down from 69%), and 51% monitor comments made about their businesses on social sites (down from 54%).

      While news like this is usually the cue for the link bait vultures to start shrieking, “Small business social media is dying!!” or something like “nobody’s doing social media anymore,” the less hysterical of us choose to see this as a the beginning of an interesting trend. And it poses a couple of interesting questions for those of us in social media:

      • What’s causing the drop in things like monitoring comments (3% drop), posting status updates (4%), or having a company page (2%)?
      • Can this drop be attributed to social media fatigue, or is it an indicator that people are willing to try the shiny new object, but will abandon it if it’s not producing any results?
      • Or are small businesses trying social media, but then get distracted by their regular work, and lose interest in the system?
      • Could this even be attributed to companies that hire interns and entry-level employees, hand them the keys to the social media car, but lose all their efforts when the interns and entry-level people move on?

      And most importantly, does this drop represent new opportunities or lost ones for social media professionals? Can they revive the interest in the businesses that abandoned their efforts? Or are these cases where the professionals could have helped, but the businesses are soured on social media?

      What have you been seeing in your own work? Are clients giving up social media or embracing it? Are they easily distracted by the latest social tool, or do they focus on the ones they’re using?

      ——
      My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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        Filed Under: Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Lead Generation, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: , , , , ,

        Not Every Social Media Consultant Knows What They’re Doing

        August 18, 2010 By 7 Comments
        Dana Nelson tweet

        I was tweeting with my friend and fellow social media consultant, Dana Nelson, a couple nights ago about a business presentation she was sitting in, when she quoted this piece of advice from the presenter.

        “Posting your business on other business sites is lame – tagging business/ cross marketing does not work.”

        Wait, what? Who said that, the business professor from Back to School?

        Cross-posting doesn’t work? Creating visible partnerships is lame? Creating a referral network is ineffectual?

        Look, there are a lot, a lot, a loooooooot of social media consultants out there. And they don’t all know what they’re talking about. It worries me that these people are spreading poor information out there. It’s like a volunteer sheriff’s deputy telling people you can’t be arrested for drunk driving if you’re wearing your seat belt. (Caution: You can be arrested for drunk driving, even if you are wearing your seat belt.)

        And this 16-word piece of misinformation is a doozy, and so wrong in so many ways.

        • It’s a widely accepted fact in search engine optimization circles that promoting a business site on another site is going to give me some big search engine juice. Anyone who understands basic SEO knows that backlinks are what give your site a high search engine ranking.
        • Coke and McDonald’s would disagree with your views on cross-marketing. As would Pizza Hut and Pepsi. Or any movie studio with Happy Meal Toys and Burger King Kids’ Meal Toys. Or BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon. And any sponsors of any NASCAR or Indy Car racing team.
        • People buy from people they like, and accept recommendations from people they trust. If Dana recommends a good restaurant to visit, I’m going to believe her. Why? Because I like her and trust her. It’s the same with businesses. If a business I trust recommends the services of another business, I’m going to believe them. The smart thing for small businesses to do is to team up with allied businesses.
        • There are more business networking experts than there are social media experts (as hard as that is to believe). Nearly all of them will shout the praises of networking, referral sharing, and cross-promoting. And I’ll believe business networking experts who measure their experience in years and decades, not weeks and months.

        This is just one of many reasons why you need to screen your so-called social media “expert” before you hire them. Especially if they blather on with inane bits of advice like this.

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          Filed Under: Marketing, Networking, Reputation Management, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

          Do Small Businesses Need a Social Media Person in Marketing?

          December 22, 2009 By 3 Comments

          A reporter posted a question to an email list I belong to, about whether small businesses need a specific social media expert on their marketing team. I replied that I thought a small business did not need an expert. Rather, they just need to appoint someone on their marketing team whose job it is to participate in social media, but that person can learn the ropes about the different tools they would use. (They will need other knowledge. More on that in a minute.)

          Although people have become more and more specialized over the years, at least in the marketing world, social media and the Internet are turning us back into generalists.

          You don’t need a special videographer, script writer, and editor to create a corporate video, you only need a Flip camera, a YouTube account, and some creativity to get your videos out to your customers. You don’t need a PR specialist to send out press releases to the local media, you need someone who is already connected to them on Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with them personally. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying a bit, but you get my point.)

          And you don’t need someone who has logged thousands of hours on Twitter or Facebook, has written a book, or is a top-notch computer programmer (although they’re all very nice).

          You do need:

          1. someone who has the time to do it on a regular, consistent basis. This is not something to do just once in a while, but needs to be done a couple hours per day.
          2. someone the company trusts enough to speak for its brand publicly. This is typically not an intern.
          3. someone who understands message creation and social psychology. It’s not the knowledge of the tools that is important, but the knowledge of how to create a solid message and how that message will affect a chosen group. Again, this is typically not an intern.
          4. management buy-in and their understanding that this is not just jacking around on “Facespace or whatever you young people call it.” They need to be committed to this venture, just like they have every other marketing campaign you’ve done.

          We’ve reached the point that social media is no longer a fad. It has incredible usage rates that show that it’s here to stay. The tools may change over the years, but this connectedness among us is not going anywhere for a long while. And because these things are so easy, anyone can do it. The challenge is finding someone who actually knows how to harness the power, and has the time to do it.

          Business will serve themselves well by either hiring someone who does social media marketing as part of their responsibilities, or contracting out to someone on a part-time basis to do the work. But either way, they need to jump on this bandwagon before they’re left at the side of the road with the people still running their IBM PS/2s wondering when all this talk about the Internet is going to die down.

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            Filed Under: Communication, Networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , ,