Company Social Media

One sentence blog: If you're a tech company trying to grow, and you don't effectively utilize Social Media, then you're not a smart company.

Personal Social Media Use

In the last blog I Spoke briefly about how companies leverage Social Media for ROI – which will continue on in a later discussion. But today I want to talk about the user group that Social Media initially benefitted most from, and that is individuals – as themselves, not as their companies or schools - Purely interested in meeting others in the Social space of the internet with similar interests.

This user group is not only the largest, it is also indefinitely valuable for companies to try and reach out to. To become a part of something that has the ability to scale your marketable presence through individual user interaction to global within just a couple of minutes is unbelievable. This relates to the phenomenon of viral videos, which will most likely be discussed in our eMarketing blog by Chad Bontrager (keep a lookout!).

The most exciting part of personal Social Media users is that many of the companies and opportunities you would like to reach out to as either a company or yourself have their own personal pages in the Social Media world which they use to communicate with friends and family, express interests, etc… This is a double whammy scenario – you are able to highlight whatever it is you may want to highlight straight to these personal users.

In the past few weeks, ProKarma has connected with good friends and partners from other companies which have been valuable and wonderful relationships all through the use of Online Communities. Hey, now we’re getting into the meat of this stuff! Social Communities – if you haven’t heard of these, get out from under your rock and stay tuned for the next blog I bring out on these new fangled community thingies, and more importantly, how your company can provide a valuable presence on them.

Corporate Social Media Use

The initial design of my companies' Social Media campaign included much research on how other companies are using SM. One of the most surprising things I found was that there are TONS of companies benefitting from a Social Media campaign of some form or another, especially the larger and more powerful companies. Hmm… they must know something!

Companies can use Social Media sites such as FaceBook™, Twitter™, Digg™, etc… for a variety of valuable practices. Common uses include community outreach, recruiting by posting jobs, general company information like news releases, and inner company connectivity through employee interaction. A great example is IBM’s company FaceBook™ Fan Page. This Fan Page has almost 20,000 fans - many of them are current and past IBM employees! The ability to bring together a company that is worldwide, which has thousands of employees, is now possible through an exciting Social Medium (get it!).

This doesn’t apply only to large companies though, this is for all companies. I can’t think of very many other initiatives that can reach a near infinite ROI. After all, what is the investment? A couple of hours a week of a Social Media savvy employee? If your company Twitter™ update or your company blog that has shown up on StumbleUpon™ sparks just one call that leads to one piece of business – BOOM, initiative paid for! Even if it does not evoke outside business, the ability to bring your employees together and inspire discussion among the talent which drives your company is infinitely valuable as well.

There is just very little downside when your Social Media leadership is responsible, efficient, and relevant.


- Matthew Taylor

Twitter: @mtaylord