Technology has advanced in the past years to improve business relations as I have touched on in many other of my posts, but with these advancements come some negatives. These negatives are range from the small things like corporations need for more education to large issues about ethical decisions of workers' usage of social media. As time progresses these issues are predicted to continue to worsen unless action is taken.
Consequences of Social Media
Entrepreneur's Daily Dose
In a recent Smart Plant article touched on five issues that faced by corporations using social media. These five issues included social media threatening to overtake paid searches, the line between individual employee's tweets become corporate property, the need for social network training within business, and how to reach the correct audience with a message through social mediums like Facebook or Twitter. Because of these issues many corporations have decided to put the brakes on social media campaigns.
Hitting The Brakes
Many traditional corporations have focused on the traditional marketing strategy of the five "Ps": Product, Price, Place, Promotion and the most important to social media, Participation. Large Fortune 500 corporations are finding that
"Inherently risk averse and overly protective of their market positioning, corporate leaders have far too many lawyers and others spinning cautionary tales laden with drastic potential outcomes as a result of directly engaging their customers and prospects in full view of one another."
This was a comment made by Daily Dose writer, Mikal E. Belicove in a Entrepeneur article called Why Big Corporations Are Putting The Brakes On Social Media. The article cites a report from the Center of Marketing Research at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth which showed the slowing of social media growth within large Fortune 500 companies. The report states that only a bit more than half of these corporations are using social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Public Can Be the Biggest Enemy
Heidi Cohen.com
Through social media, the public has the ability to voice opinion as well has the chance to cause a corporate crisis. Marketing expert, Heidi Cohen published an article on her website titled When Social Media Goes Bad, that gave incites to how stakeholders like customers can start uproar in corporations that use social media outlets. She cites that corporations can't control or own the conversations as they are free and open to public as they can voice their own issues or opinions. Through this freedom, public cannot be stopped in expressing personal opinions therefore it becomes a problem for corporations to wait to respond to an issue or wait for it to disappear. Cohen also says that many corporations have hidden behind an avatar or medium which will just make the issue worse. She as well advises corporations to not use social media to get their response message out because as in so many cases it will be mocked or turn into an viral humor.
Is It Really That Bad?
Looking at these consequences and risks of using social media for corporations shows both sides to the story. If social media is not used effectively these consequences can be avoided with some action and effort, otherwise it is eventually that crisis or issues will occur. Bill Laberis, a social media and business lecturer agrees that Facebook and Twitter will only causes corporations issues, but he does argue websites like LinkedIn benefit because of the different formatting. Well whether it is any of social media mediums only corporates, stakeholders, and the public is decide its effectiveness.
There is Facebook for your friends, family, and former high school classmates. There is Pinterest for all your crafting, dreaming, and cooking ideas. And then finally Twitter for all the updates or opinions you have on line. But now there is a new social media giant coming to town called LinkedIn. This networking community has been active since 2003 and now boasts over 150 million subscribers that use the website to network, post resumes, and look at new job opportunities.
The More Serious Networking Site
A recent Washington Post article talked to the young entrepreneurs/CEOs about how their companies have used social media websites to better their business. The founder of Beat the GMAT stated this about LinkedIn,
"We consider LinkedIn to be more of a serious, professional social network. Thus, we tend to have a more formal style of writing updates on this service. Generally, we don’t think that LinkedIn members come to the site for social purposes — they want to receive updates that are meaningful for their careers and/or education. So keeping this in mind, we try to frame our updates in ways that are relevant to careers and education."
Socialmedialandscape.com
The founder goes on to comments how this companies use other websites such as Facebook or Twitter for more " irreverent, fun, or controversial." So it seems answer the question that their is a social media website for every corporations' message or needs. I found this interesting in the fact as it agrees with the idea raised in the textbook about social shaping theory. Baym points out on page 45 that social shaping is "interrelated nodes in constantly changing sociotechnnical networks, which constitute the forms and uses of technology differently in different times ans places for different groups." LinkedIn has made its the serious networking career website because that is its users' purpose for it. They have shaped LinkedIn.
Entrepreneurs of Ourselves
LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman, in a CBS interview said that we all must begin to realize the potential these social media websites can do not only for our corporations but our own personal brands/image.
He also said, ""One of the things I realized after some number of years of doing LinkedIn was that the world has changed in a way that we all need to be the entrepreneurs of ourselves, the CEO of ourselves. That's because of globalization, that's because of acceleration. That's because of competition, change by technology and industries. So the question is how do you adapt to the modern world? And the key people who adapt are entrepreneurs. So, we all need to be the entrepreneurs of ourselves."
So whether you like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, or want try something new like LinkedIn; the message is the same all social media is making an impact on corporations' messaging and our own personal entrepreneurship.
There is only one website in the world that boasts over 400 million users. Facebook. This single website hosts a social networking phenomena which has become gold to advertising agencies and corporations with its invention of the sidebar. This single strip of space on the webpage can add to a companies customer based and profit margin in under 1 inch of space and less than 50 words. So how does this simple concept work?
How To Do It
DuctTapeMarketing.com
John Jantsch, lays it all out for corporations in 5 simple steps; target, attract and engage, budget, test, and finally analyze. These 5 simple steps can be achieved through Facebook Ad Manager. The service helps you create the ad, select your demographic to market to, run it and show you "Insights." Insights is another program inside of Ad Manager that manages your viewership and the quality of your ad.
Money to Be Earned This simple and effective way of advertising raises about $5 billion dollars in revenue for companies and is expected to rise to about $10 billion dollars according to a 2012 article.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quoting saying about his company's ability for continuous growth in profits, "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."
Changing the Face of Advertising
It not hard to argue that there is has been changes in the way the world's companies now advertise its products. As I know for myself and my own generation that we are addicted and attached to social networking. We love when we can find people and information fast and easy, which means our advertising needs to be the same way. Fast and Easy.
The CEO of Arc Worldwide noted that they have to follow the trend of "shifting their focus to what connects with people and away from the medium that we’re going to use."
A Trend That Is Here To Stay
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about how corporations have begun to use Twitter to start trending and updating their customers on their products. These idea was revolutionary in the market of public relations, now it seems that social media advertising like the Facebook sidebar ads is doing the same thing to the world of advertising. As with any new revolutionary trend, it will take time for the world to join including the advertising and corporations. But it could not be called successful unless the new trend lasted long enough to become an dominant part of modern culture and society. It seems that Facebook has already established that it will be around for the long run, as well will the new sidebar advertising.
