One of the great things about Social Media is its ability to kick-start conversations away from an organisation’s corporate web presence. In the early days of the Internet people would typically create a website, from where they sold or informed people about their products. But with the advent of blogs and more recently applications like Twitter, Facebook pages and Delicious the conversations that companies start can now be re-ignited on other platforms.
Peter Drucker, writer and management consultant, once said:
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
More recently I saw an online presentation where Shiv Singh of Razorfish said that with Social Media:
The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
And I suppose that by providing people with the tools to tell their friends, family, colleagues, business associates and today social media followers what they have seen, heard and thought these messages have a way of spreading very quickly and effectively to highly targeted individuals across the Internet.
For those who are not too familiar with how these tools work I’ll try and offer a brief overview. You may not have noticed it but the BBC has been offering these tools for many years now.
If you have an account with any of the above you can click on the link and ‘take the story’ over to your selected account, as I have done below:
In this case I am acting as a marketer, whether I know it or not, for the other organisation. If we look at blogs we can see, like many other apps, many opportunities to share information. On this website, www.MarketingTom.com, you are able to leave comments and hence add value to the posts; you can click on the trackback feature and take the conversation over to your own blog; you are able to Digg the article and it would be listed on Digg.com; you can bookmark so that your friends and followers can see it on Delicious and you can Retweet it. Perhaps this last one has the greatest potential at the moment as it opens up many opportunities for an article to be viewed by followers who have your same interests and passions.
An example I often use on the Social Media Marketing workshops I run is that of Mashable. Mashable is a Social Media news blog covering ‘cool’ new websites and social networks and has rocketed in popularity over the past year. If you look at its website you will notice that every article offers readers the chance to Tweet, Buzz (with Google) or Share on Facebook. Now consider that EACH of those retweets may be sent to people who have hundreds (or thousands) of followers and you start to get an idea of how powerful these buttons can be.
I suppose one of the biggest issues with these buttons is the fact that most people see them them but don’t get what they do. However, if you can teach your target audience what they do, you may find more people using them and helping you. So, why don’t you test these tools out by clicking on the Digg This, Tweet This or Save To Delicious buttons below!
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