Five social media tips and traps for business

As a team of experienced IT and telecom consulting professionals, we believe in testing and analyzing advanced next-generation technologies. We strive to understand the features, benefits and challenges that these emerging technology solutions can provide to small technology oriented businesses like Fox Group as well as our client organizations.

It is in this vein that we investigated, tested and analyzed multiple personal and business social media applications. Our goals were to see what these various applications could do, what skills it would take to set up and maintain them, and track and monitor the business benefits and challenges.

Our objectives of using social media

Our objectives were to try the various applications to understand the skills, resources and time investment necessary to develop and maintain these environments. We also strove to identify and analyze the business benefits from these tools, i.e. increased revenue, brand awareness, etc.

During the past three years some of the social media applications that we have analyzed have included Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, YouTube, and most recently Twitter.

Top 5 Lessons Learned

Each one of these applications requires unique technical and marketing resources and skills to develop and maintain the site or pages.

Each application has a different purpose or objective, i.e. information sharing, education, entertainment, business leads, social/family keeping in touch, etc. Some have unique demographic audiences, while others overlap. It is difficult to identify, track and monitor the marketing/business benefits from participating in them as a professional services/consulting business (non-product oriented). They all take a lot more time and effort than any of us expected. From our tracking, it probably takes a minimum of 10 to 15 hours per week to read, review and comment or respond to keep in touch.

Our recommendations to the business community

Point One – Social media is here to stay as part of all businesses long-term marketing programs, disregarding the customer demographics. As such, all businesses should be investigating and piloting these applications to determine the appropriate application(s) for their company.

Point Two – Most network dependent youth use these tools in their daily social life, and are driving suppliers to deploy them in order to gain a share of their wallet. As these young people move into management positions, they will force the adoption of these applications as a foundation to long term corporate marketing strategies.

Last Point – As a technology dependent small business who works with tech-savvy clients, evaluating and more importantly using these social medium tools has become a effective mechanism of marketing our professional consulting services … from a reach, cost and thought leadership perspective.

Jump in and try it … there is lots to learn and there are benefits to be had!

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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