4 Reasons Your Organization Should Embrace Social Media

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) Oct 26, 2009

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Regardless of what executives or collective management think, social networks are already shaping how business is done. From how projects are managed to how customers interact with your company, social networks are here and can have a positive effect on any organization. Here are 4 practical reasons to jump on the bandwagon.

Working The Social Scene

Whether it be Facebook, Twitter or the many business products that are throwing social apps into their feature lists with abandon, you cannot ignore the impact of social media on your business. With claims that the use of social networks helped win Barack Obama the presidency, and with many major companies represented across a growing number of social sites, can you afford not to engage? What is in it for you and what would you do with this social intercourse?

Social networks come in many flavors; the wiki that allows staff to disseminate best practices, tips and advice; the Facebook fan page or Twitter account that lets customers interact with representatives to the community built from the ground up for clients/customers. There are a wide range of possibilities, and you don't have to be a multinational to make an impact.

Internal Versus External

Internal social networks help enhance the usual communication systems such as phone and e-mail. They can also improve how the organization collates and transfers knowledge between experts and new hires, separate departments across regions, and between management and the workforce.

External social services let your company interact with the wider public, potential customers and also tie your company and its products in with live news and events. For example, how many millions of people saw "Gmail is down, why not use our service?" messages at the height of the last Google outage?

With that in mind what are the reasons that someone would let the perils of social networking loose within their enterprise?

1. Get a New Voice With Twitter

Reasons to use: Popular, quick reaction from interested parties, instantaneous launch time, new way to develop and improve customer relationships

For a smaller company or any organization wanting to ride the wave of Twitter's popularity, the micro-blogging service provides a free way to get a message out there and 'meet' customers/users/clients. With the focus on the message, thanks to the 140 character limit, there is little room for fluff, flowery prose, just get to the point.

While anyone can use the Twitter website or a free application such as TweetDeck, there are plenty of business-focused applications to help manage your company's Twitter interactions in a more fruitful manner. These tools can help focus the tweets to local markets, ensure customer queries are met, schedule future tweets and show how positive or negative the flow of comments is.

Pros:
Gives a free voice for your company or product.
Perfect place to adopt an informal or casual tone.
Allows questions to be asked and answered in real time.

Cons:
Requires regular attention and consistent application of the company message.
Can become a focal point for trivial complainers.
Missteps or mistakes can (and will) be publicly broadcast.
Can become a drain on time and resources for smaller companies.