On Internet Business

Internet traffic and social media

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

Business people are increasingly aware of social media, without always knowing how to exploit it, or even how to react to social media incursions into the business word.

First of all, it’s important to understand what social media is – it’s a communication system, rather than an information system.  In other words, it doesn’t just supply the customer, or potential customer, with information but allows interaction. In the simplest form, this interaction could be as limited as letting viewers vote for a video or article (Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon) or as complex as the way that Flixster can recommend films to a user, by using the ratings of films provided by other Flixster users with similar interests. The strongest forms of social media allow not just communication but creation – such as the Skittles brand which was supposed to allow visitor uploads of Skittles related videos.

Managing Social Media

Managing social media is complicated – that same brand awareness campaign for Skittles had the Twitter component pulled after an upbeat start to the campaign degenerated into a long run of profane and pornographic tweets … all of which were appearing, in real time, on the Skittles homepage. The facebook campaign has been more successful, and the demographic data collection resulting from visits to the Skittles homepage has been highly successful (to enter the site you have to type in your date of birth) allowing a data-cull of immense proportions.  Presumably though, Skittles set out to increase brand awareness and sales, not to reap data, so the jury is still out on these kinds of highly managed social media campaigns – they involve high risks for the brand, especially if negative commentary outweighs positive.

Static websites may soon not be enough to sustain a business with a large online component. The internet is no longer website-based, it has become a fragmented series of systems, including social media, each of which appeals to different groups. Twitter, for example, is said to be a turn-off for teenagers (although in the weeks following this claim, many teenagers tweeted vociferously about failures in the research that led to the Morgan Stanley report) but MySpace is a big hit with the same teenage demographic. Facebook is a great campaigning area, but is also associated with bullying, both of individuals and groups. Brand bullying is a potential outcome of using this kind of social media, and that’s pretty well what happened to Skittles.

Getting Social Media Wrong

The way to avoid problems is to ensure that you build trust through social media, doing more listening than ‘talking’ and ensuring that you are relating to your customer base, not to trolls who can warp your views of your demographic as well as trying to force you to make revealing or damaging remarks as happened recently at radio station KNRK in the USA.

Most experts advise getting as senior a person as possible to be the ‘face and voice’ of your social media, which is working very well for Ford in the USA for example, who have senior communications executives blogging and tweeting about Ford’s restructuring. However, if your exec is not extremely media savvy, they are likely to end up making horrible blunders. Alternatively you can use a professional service to manage your tweets and micro-blogs, but that also has its problems. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) has recently been caught out after a silly mistake on his blog revealed that he wasn’t actually writing the material himself.

Next time – how to get social media right …

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