(4) Engage prospective customers and partners interactively. Invite feedback and input, and be responsive, attentive, empathetic, and supportive.
To start, let’s not confuse social media and social networking — both terms are used interchangeably — with e-commerce. With e-commerce Big Fat Finance, you put up a Web site for the purpose of conducting business, making sales, and generating revenue.
You can find me hanging around the business, content, and technology groups on LinkedIn . You are welcome to join my network by inviting me to join yours. It’s free. ###
(1) Establish presence. With hundreds of millions of active participants (Facebook alone has several hundred million registered users), you want continuous visibility among the people who are important to your business, be they customers, partners, or other stakeholders.
(2) Build rapport and relationships with specific audiences. Cultivate relationships with your important stakeholder groups through two-way communication.
(5) Listen and learn from your customers, supporters, and all your various stakeholders. Encourage constructive criticism, conduct surveys, solicit suggestions.
Social media generally avoid explicit commercial transactions. Instead, you create content with social media to build the business and the brand, everything from recruiting talent to rallying the faithful to countering bad news. (It will be interesting to see if and how Toyota leverages social media to rebuild its brand.)
Late in January, wiredFINANCE looked at the suggestion that social networking for business is “cr*p” and found that there actually can be something of value for business in social networking. Months earlier, wiredFINANCE found that budgeting and any collaborative financial process, such as accounts receivable, could benefit from social networking.
(3) Establish your business as a leader and authority, by providing helpful and insightful content that can’t easily be found elsewhere, information people want.
And just so that social networking isn’t all about the company, here are 20 social networking sites for business professionals.
A recent piece from Jake Swearington cites a survey of 1,600 executives by William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, which found that those firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that don’t.
With that in mind, here are 6 content-driven things that any business can and should do with social media:
However, the one thing you cannot do through the food company’s social networking site is actually buy its products. The closest it comes is providing a way for visitors to download discount coupons.
(6) Build brand and company loyalty. Social media is an ideal vehicle to grow whatever loyalty initiatives your organization engages in.
Even my colleagues at Business Finance Magazine have recently created a Linked-in page and a Twitter page. What’s more, BF’s editor in chief Jack Sweeney and managing editor John Cummings have begun tweeting daily. Clearly Big Fat Finance, Social media/networking also can do good things for the business itself.
Social media is not overtly transaction-oriented. Rather, it revolves around content-driven marketing.
For example, one large consumer packaged food company put up a social media Web site. It does all the expected customer service things through the site, includes discussion forums for use by its customers, offers recipes and enables customers to share recipes, and provides ask-the-experts forums on related topics — all content-driven.
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