What’s right with social media

I just returned from two days of speaking at the Social Media Summit in NYC, where I did a co-presentation with Josef Katz at Trump University and led a post conference workshop entitled: Advanced Social Media Strategies: How to Make Social Media Work for Your Organization.

During the post-conference workshop, one of the first things I spoke about were the pros and cons corporate social media engagement.

Here are the pros:

Shortens time to market. The corporate blog, podcast or online community can be used to “soft pitch” ideas for new products and services and save valuable time and energy on developing products that simply don’t have a chance of hitting the mark. Feedback can be sought and strategic tweaks and tucks can be made before a product leaves the ideation stage.

Improves existing products and services. In much the same way social media can be used to solicit feeback about planned products and services, it can be used to improve existing offerings as well.

Gives you your own turf. One of the most common questions I get while speaking and writing for various blog is: “What do I do if someone posts incorrect or inflammatory statements about my brand on their blog?” My answer is always: “The best defense is offense.” Bring the conversation back to your own turf (blog/podcast/community) where you can more closely monitor the conversation AND provide the facts that you’d like to in a way that works for your organization. (More on how to do this in another blog post…) Don’t just be a part of the conversation about your brand facilitate that conversation.

Increases thought leadership. Someone asked a question in class yesterday – they wanted to know what exactly thought leadership is. I explained that it is a way for experts, who want to be known in their industry, to follow macro and micro trends and then take that information extrapolate the global meaning and implications and present that to their audience. Social media is excellent at delivering this benefit. Tom Peters and Seth Godin use social media for this purpose (and others, I’m sure) every day.

Better SEO. Because blogs, communities and even podcast descriptions are so keyword content-rich they work wonders for search engine optimization. And, if the blog is attached to the website itself like http://www.anycompany.com/blog – and not a vanity domain like http:/www.anycompanyblog.com, all the better.

Visbility. The best way to be visible is to be helpful. If the organization has decided to use social media, don’t lose a great opportunity to connect with your market by only promoting specials or re-hashing the latest newsletter information. Seize the opportunity to ask thought provoking questions. Provide fodder for mental stimulation. Share your latest challenge (provided it’s not confidential). ENGAGE don’t just sit there and type blog post after blog post.

Focuses on the customer. One of the attendees of the workshop yesterday openly admitted that his brand was not associated with quality customer care. And, when I asked why his corporation wanted to use social media, his top reason didn’t have anything to do with any other company and what they were doing, but rather, was all about his company’s renewed committment to connecting with their customer base and soliciting their feedback on everything from new products to support policies. Now, THAT’S a forward-thinking company.

I know I missed a few….feel free to chime in…