4 Ways ‘NOT’ using Social Media can ruin your Business!
Posted on 23. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Image by Cambodia4Kids.org
Social media is great, and as a social media consultant of course I’m going to say everybody should be utilizing it. But the question today is “Can failure to use social media hurt your company?”.
I submit that it can, I’m gonna share my top reasons and ways not embracing social media can ruin your company.
1. Competitive Edge. People, especially the younger audiences, and geeks of the world tend to support and uphold businesses that are what they consider ‘forward thinkers’. A forward thinking company to them is one that appears to listen to their concerns, molds
itself around their needs, and is up-to-speed with the latest technolegies – which includes: social media, geo-location, and mobile devices / applications.
By not embracing new technology, you appear to lack the edginess that your competitors have, and you are hurting your image with possible clients. Even business to business companies and government agencies have facebook pages.
2. Missing the Conversations that matter. In this world of connectivity, everyone is increasingly spending more and more time on the internet. Whether by phone, laptop, desktop, ipad, or even car computers, game consoles, etc… When a customer feels upset, the new trend isn’t to call customer service and wait forever on hold. A lot of people are shy or have social anxieties that make phone calls and confrontations not a pleasant prospect. These people turn to the web, and specifically social networks like facebook, twitter, local directories, and blogs.
One bad review, write-up, comment, or youtube video can get wide mass attention and easily ruin a company. By being involved in social media, learning how to track specific keywords for usage on twitter, facebook, etc – you can see when your business is talked about online. If it’s in a positive light, be sure to thank the person, and offer that if they ever have need of anything to be sure to contact you.
If on the other hand someone opens a halestorm of negativity, there are generally six steps to handling this:
- Know it happened. This is to say, if you don’t have monitoring systems in place to track your brand, you’ll never know when someone talks negatively about your company.
- Own it. Its your word against theirs, and maybe they were having a bad day when they posted it, but by owning upto your mistake, essentially letting the customer know that they are right (and the customer is always right, right?), you can diffuse the comment.
- Apologize. Let the customer know that it isn’t the policy of your company to step over customers and that you take it personally that this happened at one of your stores.
- Make Restitution. Offer something in return, some kind of good will offering that will make that customer’s issue solved. Even if you lose a deal of money on it, it can lead to some positive PR.
- KEEP it PUBLIC. When addressing someone’s negative comments don’t do it in private, don’t do it blatantly as a ‘look at me’ stunt either, but you should keep it in the public eye so others know that if they have a problem that there are channels they can go through to get it resolved. The key here is to be as real and genuine as possible.
- Don’t over-do-it. It’s easily to beg and plead for someone to give you another chance to make it upto them, but you do still need to come off as a respectable company in the end, and at the end of the day all you can do is offer to help, if they still choose to be irate, then that’s just their nature, move-on and know that you did your best, and people who surf in and see the conversation and follow-ups will see that you at least tried to make amends.
3. Losing out on quality leads. Lead companies, and direct marketers know for a fact that having a social media presence can dramatically increase the number of qualified leads that they gather on a daily basis. If your business depends on leads, then if you’re not tapping into social media you’re really losing out on a huge business builder. Facebook for instance has cheap ads that you can buy on the sidebar. These ads can be extremely heavily targeted by that user’s tastes, likes, profile, gender, age group, etc…
If you know your audience then utilizing facebooks PPC ads can definitely increase awareness about your company and get you a ton more leads.
4. Losing your brand altogether. You’ve worked hard to secure your trademarks and copyrights. Yet, on social networks its so easy for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to register an account and pretend to be an official profile for your company. They can then wreak massive damage to your brand. Many social networks now have options in place for businesses and celebrities to ‘verify’ themselves as the true entity in question.
There’s a cool tool called Knowem where you can check your brand against 350 different social networks. Using online tools like these there are many ways to track and see who’s pretending to be you or your company.
All in all there are many reasons that social media can make or break your business, the biggest reason of all is that it is the cheapest, most cost effective way to reach out to millions of people, grab their ‘trust’, and protect against bad PR and corporate identity theft.
As far as I can tell there is only one reason not to embrace social media: Fear of the unknown.
I’m willing to bet that in the 90′s you had the same trepidation over creating a web site, but in the end you caved in and hired a web designer, and it just became a ‘standard’ thing that every business did.
Social media optimization and marketing – is the new web site. It’s not so much about a single presence online, but managing multiple presences that best reflect your target demographic, specific outreach goals, and finding ‘influencers’ and ‘brand ambassadors’ who have wide networks to grow awareness of your company. By getting involved now, you stand a chance of beating your competition to this new frontier. Even if your competitors are already using social media, its a good bet that they’re still learning, and you can still move ahead of them, or at least catchup if you act now.
Not sure where to start you social media marketing strategy? We can certainly help you get started on the right path. As a bonus we not only focus on social media, but also local web marketing, and mobile marketing – three very HUGE trends right now. Click here to contact us now, or give us a call at:
About the Author
Patrick Curl Has Written 23 Articles For Us!
Patrick has been in web marketing for 9 years and social media marketing for 3 years. His presence on our marketing team is a real asset to the company.Related posts:
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