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Social networking for business
After reading my latest article on all the different social networks that I’m involved in my employer, SCHILLER Australia, is wanting to get a little more “social and interactive” on the internet so they have asked me to investigate how they can do that.
The brief that was given to me in a meeting today is that it needs to be easy, it needs to have the ability to be put in front of a large audience, it needs to be secure, and most of all it needs to be user friendly for the CEO. The obvious thing that springs to mind, for me at least, is that they should get involved in a number of different social networking websites.
So here’s what I’m thinking network wise, and some examples of how they can get involved.
Twitter - despite it’s downtime and constant crashing Twitter is actually cool and potentially quite useful to us. One use is to answer service questions and basic medical / cardiac questions. It can also be used for announcing upcoming product releases and other news articles.
Facebook - On Facebook you can setup ‘fan pages’ for companies and / or products. The awareness that could be created for public access level products, ie. at-home defibrillators and CPR training products, could be used to open the market up and have us being seen as a leader in the field.
YouTube - We sell a number of products which are very simple to use and essentially require no training, however there are always a few customers who do require some training. With these products our reps, in most cases, spend more time driving to and from the customer’s to deliver the training than they do actually training the customers. If we were able to avoid all that wasted travel time by being able to deliver the training via You Tube, or similar video site, we could save quite a bit of money and also it would also provide a great reference resource that customers can revert back to, not to mention that it could also be used as pre-sale training so that the potential customer would know a lot more about the particular product.
Last FM - Currently we have one of our old computers plugged into our telephone system and our on-hold music is played in iTunes and streamed out to the phone whenever anyone is on-hold. This is more of a novelty rather than a sales and or brand awareness tool, however it would keep information ticking over on our website as well as giving people an insight into our company persona via the types of music that we listen to.
Flickr - Our sales team is constantly on the road, and also attend a large number of conferences, expos and seminars around the world each year. We could have a company Flickr account setup to showcase these different events we attend, the people we meet, the products we see, and some of the different places we travel to each year for business. Again this is more of a novelty than an actual sales tool however it’s the sort of thing that does bring people on to your website when you’re taking their photos at various events and can show a more human side to the company rather than just being a ‘faceless organisation’.
Upcoming - Upcoming can be used as an events calendar where our customers can see where we will be displaying our product range at the various conferences, expos and other events we attend. People can subscribe to it and also contact us to book personal product demonstrations and alike.
There’s a handful of other social networking websites that I’ve also considered but am still undecided on. The reason I’m undecided on these ones varies but mostly it’s because of privacy concerns for our staff, and in the case of Linked In there is the potential that it can be used by companies to ‘head hunt’ our staff and while they could probably achieve that anyway I don’t want to make it any easier for them
So that’s what I’m thinking at the moment, and from here I will be making a presentation of this to the boss in the next couple of days so I’m eager to here from you guys think and if there are other potential social networks are out there that could be worth taking a look at as well.
Why you should work across multiple social networking sites
There’s an absolute plethora of social networking websites out there now. They come in many different shapes and sizes, abilities, disabilities, problems, solutions, and cover pretty well every subject under the sun.
But which ones should I join up to?
That’s a reasonably easy question to answer. All of them! Well maybe not every single social networking site that rears its head on Mashable, but you should get yourself signed up on all the sites that are specific to your interests and / or blogging topics.
For example, I blog about photography, video, product reviews, cooking, social networking and a few other random things so I’m on social networking sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Flickr, Last.FM, Facebook, Myspace, Virb, Friend Feed, LinkedIn and errmm I’m probably forgetting some but those are the core sites that I post to, stream to, link to, republish to and whatever else to.
Going through the above list there’s quite a number of overlaps, eg. Digg vs. StumbleUpon, YouTube vs. Vimeo vs. BlipTV, and Facebook vs. Myspace vs. Virb.
So why all the overlaps?
Everybody is different and well different people are on different websites for different reasons, eg. I really like the way BlipTV handles the videos I post and that I just have a simple block of code for my channel and whenever I publish a new video to BlipTV it automatically hits the front page of my blog, however I know more people use YouTube and Vimeo so to still bring solid traffic in from those sites I also publish the video there.
Another example would be the Facebook vs. Myspace vs. Virb network, all of them have very different user demographics so to actually get the most value out of the potential traffic you get involved with all of them.
Of course being involved in so many different websites can be very time consuming keeping people updated with your blogging and what not, not to mention quite a big distraction. Which is where websites like Friend Feed popup which basically allows you to network the updates from all your endeavors onto a single page. You can also subscribe / friend other people so you can easily keep up with the goings on in their worlds.
Aside from Friend Feed you’ve also got plenty of different browser plugins for Firefox, and even better is the browser that’s built to handle pretty well all of these websites Flock. Flock allows you to enter all of your different usernames and passwords into some handy forms and from there whenever you and your friends update one of your social accounts you get the update in Flock.
And lastly, for those not wanting to further slow Firefox down with plugins, or who don’t like the look of Flock, most of these social networking websites have many different RSS feed options that you can subscribe to in your reader of choice.
Pretty well everyday a new social networking website pops up, and every second day another one disappears. Choose wisely, stick to the core ones that have been around for a while, but also don’t be afraid to jump onto one of the new ones if it feels like it might last.
Anyway, if you’re on one of the previously mentioned websites and we’re not friends, go and friend me now!
Catch you around the web somewhere.
Find me here