So I’m sitting in the “Social Media for Business” session at day 2 of PodCamp Boston 2, and Isabel Hilborn is delving into the reasons why companies should be embracing things like blogs, wikis (“webpages whose content can be edited by its visitors” – thanks, Wikipedia!), social networking (like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn) and more, with case studies from her marketing consultancy to back it up.
I’ve found that, with some of our larger clients, turning them on to social media outlets has been a challenge. A lot of folks see it as just an additional task to cram into an already jam-packed day. What seems to get missed is, like in any business activity, is the questions of what you can get out of it.
Speaking from personal experience, our own web traffic jumped 2200% (not a typo!) as a result of blogging – the most prevalent form of social media today. So for businesses who say things like, “We need to generate more revenue from our website,” then goldangit, start blogging! You can’t make more money from your website if you can’t get more people to look at it!
Okay, I’m off the soapbox.
Isabel’s Top 4 Categories for Social Media: (with a little elaboration on function and benefit):
1. Professional: Networking, expertise and passion demonstration, reputation, trust, speaking opportunities
2. Enterprise Internal: Knowledge management, collaboration, telecommuting
3. Enterprise External: Product development, client support, focus groups4. Marketing: Awareness, reach, differentiation, lead generation, attention
There’s a talk here at PodCamp later today about burnout, and with all the things you could do in the social media sphere, boy oh boy could you get overwhelmed. I’ve already overheard a bunch of people here complaining about Twitter, for example.
So don’t worry about everything. Just do one thing, and build from there. Okay?
