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Articles

It's safe to say that many business people still don't see great business value in social media. But in the past few months, how these tools work is becoming more apparent, although we are still in the frontier era and other roles are likely to emerge. Still, there are ways of thinking about each of the major platforms that makes it easier to understand some of the purposes they serve.

Let's start with Twitter, which is the hardest of these new platforms to grasp. More than one person has said, "I don't get Twitter" and is baffled about how a website that limits messages to 140 characters can provide much value. I was one of the nonbelievers for quite some time.

But it seems clear that Twitter has emerged as the online generation's iteration of direct mail marketing. It's simple to blast out messages that serve the same purpose as all those bits of paper do. A company that can build a solid base of followers has better access to that target market and is more likely to get responses to well-crafted messages (not just any message) than it every did through the traditional way. It also serves as a good headline news service and for anyone who gets a great deal of information by browsing headlines of newspaper, the function here is the same.

For quite a while Linkedin was a good place to look at the backgrounds of potential employees, linked up with people who had skills that were hard to find. For journalists, it's a great fact-checking tool. It's a simple task to find out what a person's title is, the spelling of a name or previous jobs held. Those were all things that once took many telephone calls.

In the last few months, Linkedin appears to be growing as a platform for discussion groups. And given its more business-like nature, it provides a more culturally suitable environment than does Facebook with its company pages.

Facebook posts, however, can be used as an online newsletter in which there's no need to wait for the next edition. It lends itself to a more lively appearance than Linkedin. Tone is important and Facebook also feels more flexible in its posts than Linkedin and graphically more interesting. The ability to post photos is a big plus.

Last year, Intuit demonstrated how Facebook can be used during a crisis. When the company was hit by two long computer outages, it used its Intuit ProLine page to keep the outside world informed of the progress in restoring service. Twitter can easily be used for the same purpose but the longer messages possible with Facebook give it an edge.

What we are seeing is that these services can fill many of the same tasks that were performed before they existed. But since they enable us to do things we couldn't do before, there are going to be uses that we haven't considered, yet.

 

 

 


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