It’s Called Social for a Reason

“I was selling the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in,” runs a quote from a Harvard Business School blog entry, Debunking Social Media Myths.

Yes, it’s important to realize that social media requires time and man-power to be effective, but for many small businesses it’s often easier to find time and manpower than money.  Advertising campaigns can be prohibitively expensive . A small business does not have to spend any money up front to be on Facebook or Twitter. The issue is how much time and manpower the business allocates to social media.

Social media plays to a small business’ strength: personal relationships. It is far easier for a small business to create a personal relationship with a customer or business partner than it is for a large business.  As any  small business owner can tell you, the distinction between personal relationships and business relationships is blurred. Many of the people that a business owner connects with in traditional networks - Rotary, Chambers of Commerce, charity work etc. - are the same people they associate with in their private lives.

A recent study indicates that small business owners handle social networking the same way they handle traditional networking: by blurring the distinction between personal and business networking.  According to an article on destinationCRM.com
the three many reasons that small business use social networking are:

• Cost: Social networks often provide free tools that can be used in place of traditional services for marketing or sales.
• Customer Engagement: Small businesses list customer engagement as the number-one priority in their use of social networks for business purposes. (The second-most-popular reason? Networking with peers.)
• Image: The majority of SBs feel that social networking helps improve their companies’ image. They think they appear more forward-thinking and innovative to customers and peers.

My experience is that many small business owners are not using social media because they don’t understand what it is.  The best way to find out about social media is to get your hands dirty.  Get on Facebook, get on Twitter. Find out who among your existing social networks are already there .  Make mistakes.  Make discoveries.  You’ve got nothing to lose but time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.