If you’re in the business of communication, author and CEO coach Mike Myatt’s N2Growth blog should be on your short list. His latest article, “Social Media Demystified”, brings clarity to organizations wrestling with the apparent complexity of social media:
The simple reality is that social media has way more to do with common sense than it does with rocket science. Let me make this as simple as I can…social media simply provides you with tools and channels that allow you to extend your reach and better engage those with whom you wish to communicate.
Some great stuff, and I highly recommend it. A while back I attempted to boil down social media with some internal presentations (handout) at my office.
One of the comments got me thinking:
A person can’t be best friends with 2,000 people. It’s just not possible to read & respond to the tweets of 2,000 followers.
While this may be a true statement on the face of it, in practice it’s not necessary to directly interact with each and every one to be engaging in the SM space.
The key is knowing when - and how deeply - to interact. Having advanced keyword search tools (knowing when someone’s talking about you or your product), identifying key influencers (say, on a Twitter list), and really looking at social media through a CRM lens (vv. using a dashboard tool like CoTweet or Hootsuite) can all address the “scale” challenges.
This is where much of the true complexity lies. The principles the Mike describes in this article are excellent and common-sense; these are good principles to apply to the overall philosophy and strategy of the organizations social media interactions.
The real SM experts, I predict, are going to be the ones that understand these fundamentals, and can also help businesses with the “plumbing” of tying these myriad channels together and welding them into a usable business tool.
If done right, the “users” (the people in your company who use SM channels to interact with customers) just have simple, elegant ways to get their jobs done; the complexity is hidden.
Posted in Tools, Toys, and Geekery, Work
