Social Media might need much more effort than you thought. (Part 1)

Or no extra effort at all.

I hear the words social and media together at least 10 times a day and I’m starting to hate them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m an atheist, but a person with low tolerance to repetition. It makes me feel like when I listen to the same song 5 times a day! At first, the song might be just brilliant but three weeks later its a brain killer.

Anyway, I think the term Social Media is widely overused and not well understood. Let’s start by saying that this buzzword is a child of the Web 2.0 family. As such, it represents the democratic activity of sharing media, say content, with other people. Social Media is the phenomena of having millions of people sharing content with others.

Now, I hear many people talk about Social Media and Online Marketing. What they imply is that companies should use this kind of “new culture” to benefit their own marketing strategies. However, what most people don’t get is that this so-called Social Media is not something that you pay for as you would do with a billboard or a 30 second TV ad.

But that doesn’t mean its free or it won’t require any effort.

Social Media is about people, regular flesh and blood people. So, in order to take advantage of this trend, companies have to rely on their people to communicate the business message.

So, do you need to hire regular people for your new Social Media Dept.?

That would be too easy.

Social Media is not about a special department, is about the organization as a whole. Furthermore, it is about the entire business ecosystem around the company, let’s say providers, customers, costumers’ friends, competitors, partners and so on.

So, in order to launch a successful Social Media campaign, you will need to communicate effectively with hundreds, even thousands of spokespeople. This requires a huge effort.

Some good examples of successful companies leveraging Social Media, are Zappos and Comcast. The secret of these companies is that there are regular file and rank employees behind the web communication tools of the company (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, the blogs, etc.) Actually, most of these tools where first adopted by the employees without an specific request by their superiors. As this channels matured, the company got interested on them and they made the wisest of decisions. Instead of asking non-authorized popular spokespeople to cease their activities, they empowered them to communicate on behalf of the company.

Successful companies that care about the relationship with their customers, allocate resources in unauthorized PR efforts. Social Media works when people inside the firewall communicate with the outside world at a peer to peer level. Customers prefer to receive a simple and natural immediate answer by somebody that actually cares, than a long and rehearsed phone call by a guy that barely knows the company or the product.

So, is Social Media an effortless task? It depends. If the organization is a democratic entity where employees are empowered to try new things and act on behalf of the company, then Social Media will be a no-brainer

However, if the company is not familiar with this kind of behavior, then the effort will be huge. Many changes will need to take place even before the company sends its first tweet.