Social Media for companies
A lot of companies are trying to get on the social media bandwagon. You might have two companies, both wanting to leverage the power of social media but one gets it right and the other struggles.
The biggest shift for a lot of companies is to make sure your mindset is outward-in rather than inward-out. In the past you’d have marketing divisions that sit for a year and scope out what’s going to be their next message, and sit behind closed doors and think they have all the answers, when the answers are actually now on their fingertips externally. Their customers are more than happy to provide what their needs are. So that’s the biggest shift is one company that’s thinking outward-in is going to beat the company that’s thinking inward-out. That’s a huge paradigm shift.
The other piece is to keep the investment relatively light, because you’re not going to get it right the first time, so it’s important to be flexible and to adjust accordingly. Coca Cola gets a lot of things right but they jumped into Second Life thinking it was the next best thing and it was great, but they jumped into it a little too much. They didn’t go in with a light approach, and so they spent tons of money and then they only had about 30 people come to visit this pavilion that they built within Second Life. Some of the stuff is changing quickly so it’s important to be as light as possible and adjust quickly.
A great term to use is Beta. Google uses Beta a lot when they’re doing their stuff. From a tax purpose you can write that off as an investment.
Banning social media in the work place is:
* Analogous to banning the Internet
* Analogous to banning the phone because you might make a personal phone call
* Analogous to banning paper and pens because you might pass a note that is not related to class or work
* Could potentially signal to current workers and future recruits that your company just doesn’t “get it”
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,”
This post was copied from somewhere and we forget , but we find it really interesting to share .
