An Imperfect Business - social media

Just had a quick read of the article and there were some very interesting points.

I don't think many people would class social media as perfect

All the same old rules still apply.

Is it cost effective?

What's the strategy?

How does it position us?

How do we measure it?

etc.

Social media is just another window to the world, which needs to be managed.

Of course, it's imperfect. That's what makes it more exciting. Pioneers tend to make these lofty quotes (ex. "social media is the new frontier," etc) and 'feet-firmly-on-the-ground' types tend to be pessimists. It's a matter of finding the balance between the ideal and what's required, in my opinion.

This is an interesting and informative read. I agree with you on the Dilbert thing,too! Thanks for sharing.

Social Media is probably less effective for large corporates with big marketing budgets. Having said that it's an effective means of two way communication, a more interactive form of communication where users have the opportunity to 'tweet' businesses with ideas for change, their greivances, what they like, what they don't - a prime example of this is the recent facebook campaign by KitKat where they got users to vote for their favourite new flavour of kit kat chunky.

However for small businesses social media is more important than ever - they don't have massive marketing budgets so, although as the article says "social media is never free" it fills a niche for those not looking to spend fortunes on add campaigns.

Hmmm that might be slowing down as well. I read on mashable lately that some companies that serve as a service for tweeting like tweetadder etc. are being sued by twitter for spamming. I seems that there is a bit of a crackdown going on atm.

I think social media can be beneficial for just about any business. It all depends on how you use it. Even though twitter seems to be more straight forward, some really large corporates are having great success with facebook. With the advent of apps that can be used to promote interaction between fans/visitors and potential customers, I could see them leaning more towards facebook than twitter.

social media is definitely imperfect but is evolving every day. I think it is more about what opportunities does one business can get in doing social media - some are pro-active some are not.

The problem I find with twitter is that the news feed updates so quickly (especially for people who are following a lot of people) that your tweet is soon replaced by the tweets of others, sometimes within minutes whereas with facebook the content you write stays visible and current for much longer as the news feed does not change so rapidly.