Do you think twitter / facebook / digg / bing are just fads?MAYBE! There has been a lot of activity with business partnerships and buy-outs being announced by Microsoft / Google / Yahoo / Firefox. So we don’t think so.
Do you think it’s only for the youngsters? WRONG! The biggest age profile is 35-50 year olds and the oldest Twitter is 104.
Do you think they only about life, celebrities and what they had for lunch? WRONG! Okay sometimes twitters do talk about life. But their life includes companies’ services, products, opinions and instructions on hacking, negotiating a better deal, telling each what price they got things for.
Social media as a philosophy and way of interacting will not go away – so where does business fit into this …
The important point for companies is how quickly these social media innovations have moved from the margins into everyday conversations of people.
Twitter is already one of the first places people look for breaking news, often by eyewitnesses, on everything from plane crashes to earthquakes. It’s also the place companies look when trying to monitor not just run-of-the-mill customer opinions (“wow Wal-Mart super center employees are rude!”) but real-time feedback on their own breaking news stories.
For instance, Domino’s Pizza recently used Twitter to engage directly with people spreading the news about a YouTube video that showed employees adding nonstandard ingredients to the food. By responding to the scale and intensity of the customer mood, Domino’s averted what could have been a major PR disaster.
Twitter is also becoming an alternate source for real-time, social searches. People would rather find a good Indian restaurant via a recommendation from someone who ate there last night or possibly even a few minutes ago rather than trawl Google results based on years’ worth of reviews and links (probably polluted by commercial firms using SEO tactics to beat the algorithm).
Interestingly, Google has just added user-generated voting, like the social news site Digg, where individuals can promote or remove link results depending on how useful they are.
Using Social Media
Publishing your life to an audience of casual acquaintances and sharing opinions with people you vaguely know turns out isn’t the same as real friendship. A recent study showed that whether a Facebook user had 50 or 500 friends they still end up interacting meaningfully with the same small group of about 12.
The addictiveness of social networking is partly based on game mechanics, where collecting friends, followers or racking up the number of tweets and status updates is like accumulating points. The psychological drive to win is primary.
This is a very important dynamic of the social medias for companies to grasp and understand in order to successfully innovate in this space.
Based on this insight – the devalued nature of friends in a virtual world – Burger King recently held a campaign that rewarded people with a free Whopper for sacrificing 10 Facebook friends. It mischievously and brilliantly worked. Burger King played with social media conventions while driving the redemption of coupons to influence sales. In this case, an online friendship was worth about one-tenth of a cheeseburger about or 37¢ (US).
Another recent innovation was by MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group. They invented a tiny digital projector that connects to your mobile phone and beams Amazon.com reviews or recommendations from your social network onto products as you pick them up in a shop. You can access this information like a “sixth sense,” as naturally as using sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch. Before launch they obviously needed to test its robustness and that it indeed worked. Using social media they received 63,416 twitters volunteer to test the beta version. A ready-made test lab. Who knew and it was all free.
We are also seeing real-time sales streamed through social media. Examples of this are:
- The Botanicals experiment, where plants tweet whenever they need watering.
- BakerTweet, from the digital agency Poke, is an e-commerce example. Local bakers tell Twitter followers when freshly baked goods have popped out of their ovens. This clever semi-automated system combines virtual community with real-time inventory information about perishable products like doughnuts & cupcakes
And it’s not limited to smaller players:
- Dell has used Twitter as a sales channel, already selling more than $1 million of discounted & discontinued products through alerts to followers.
- Ford uses Twitter to monitor customer complaints and provides you with your personal mechanic during your car’s service.
The Key for Success
In the social media you must be interested in the relationship for you cannot hide. Be anything else and you will be called out by your friends and followers in these social medias.
Your tone must be authentic and honest; you need to engage in conversation, add value to your followers, show respect and above all you must don’t SELL. Dell are successful through Twitter because they list the products available and only tweet to advise when new stock is added – successfully not selling, adding value by providing information and being honest.
To start a company needs to find out what people are talking about, understand who these people are and who may be potential followers. You need to create or have a reason for being there on the social site and of course you must engage.
What’s Next?
While a lot of companies begin to look to enter the social media world and grabble with answers to them, self-respecting digital trend spotters started looking elsewhere at least a year ago.
Just check out the Google suggestions for the query “what’s next after:” Nearly all the results involve tech tools.
Imagine a combination of Digg, Twitter, Wikipedia, and consumer review sites like Trip Advisor mashed together into a user-generated decision-making tool that helps you answer any question from “Which laptop should I buy?” to “What color should I paint my nails?”
Where Twitter prompts users with the question “What are you doing?” the startup Hunch, from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, filters out the miscellaneous conversational buzz.
Instead, Hunch is designed to focus on useful information to discover and share by asking: “What are you making a decision about?”
In theory, the more people who use social answer services like Hunch or Aardvark, the more valuable the recommendations will become.
Crowd sourcing, or aggregating views on which film to see or tourist attraction to visit is one thing. However, people are outsourcing decisions on health issues, banking and education to people they don’t know – they probably don’t even have a true photo of them