Using social media just because everyone else is does not mean you should, at least not yet.
Before jumping into all the chatter and all the advertising
organizations would be better served by asking themselves a series of
questions. Finding the answers to the questions will require you to
“think” about critical issues which will have serious impacts on the
use of social media.
First you need to understand what it should be used for vs. what it
shouldn’t be used for. To answer these questions you must think about
how effective are your current communications, internally and
externally. Why? Because communications is the essence of an economy,
your economy, and unless you master it you will indeed hurt your
economy.
Think About Your Communications
Keven Kelly writes Because communication–which in the end…… is what the digital technology and media are all about — is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
This vanguard is not about computers. Computers are over. Most
of the consequences that we can expect from computers as stand-alone
machines have already happened. They have sped up our lives, and made
managing words, numbers, and pixels quite extraordinary, but they have
not had much more effect beyond that.
The new economy is about communication, deep and wide. All the transformations suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are revolutionizing communications.
Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our
humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems.
This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to
culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are
beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication,
and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not
because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our
day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts
reverberate at the root of our lives.
Results Are Fueled By Communications
The blogosphere is filled with commentary on how to get an ROI from
social media. There are dozens of tools to use in measuring your social
media campaign and its effectiveness. However measuring the output of social media is like playing tennis by watching the scoreboard, you will loose the game.
Social media is a way to communicate. Unless you know how to
communicate in relational terms rather than marketing and advertising
terms your result will be failure, wide open and transparent for
everyone to witness. Learning to communicate in relational terms goes
against everything most people have learned in business. Subsequently
before using social media organizations must unlearn and rethink
everything they previously learned and thought about relative to
communications and market relations.
Using social media effectively demands mind-sets and
capabilities that are unfamiliar and sometimes even counter intuitive
to many business managers. It requires building trusting
relations with your market, internal and external, rather than
enforcing top-down out dated policies. Business managers should allow
themselves and the entire organization time to unlearn and rethink
everything before they “jumping into” social media. Most are following
those who haven’t unlearned and rethought how, where, when,who, why and
what they communicate which ultimately produces results, good bad and
indifferent.
Results are the end result of how well and what people and processes
communicate. You shouldn’t use social media until you know how well and
what your people and processes communicate to all markets, internally
and externally. Using it without knowing this is like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Splat!
What say you?