Social networking online helps you connect with customers

This month I thought it might be interesting to take a look at this whole “online social networking” thing.

I’m personally pretty tired of the term, but then it’s something I read about and deal with every day. I essentially see social networking online as no different from what we do when we get together with friends at a party or while at a convention cocktail hour before the awards banquet.

What I’m talking about is communicating with people who have the same interests as you. Perhaps they’re family or friends you’ve known for a long time. Or maybe they’re your customers or organization members. I think this is a lot of what’s behind the success of instant messaging, user forums, texting, Web sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and, of course, blogging and podcasting.

What businesspeople need to understand is that these new media tools are not just readily available, inexpensive and easy to use but all about connecting people to information they want and to each other. It has nothing to do with reaching a mass audience, although that often happens.

Just look at how many times the Hillary Clinton commercial, a mashup of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl advertisement, has been downloaded from YouTube (more than 4 million times). Consumers of today have the tools to find what and whom they want with a few clicks of a mouse without being dependent on the old-fashioned gatekeepers of information. I’m writing about this to challenge you to join in the conversation.

Let’s say you’re a member organization and wondering why no one seems to be reading that four-color slick newsletter that a staff of four took a month to produce, print and mail. Could it be that by the time it showed up in their mailbox your members had long ago seen or heard about everything in it?

Are you a local retailer who has been convinced that the only way to get new business is to spend money printing cards that are mass mailed to local addresses or, worse, added to the large pile of flyers, coupon sheets and other paraphernalia that fleshes out the Sunday newspaper? It could be that you are missing a growing opportunity to connect in a very real way with your customers.

I can understand the reluctance of big corporations to dive into new media. With all their layers of bureaucracy that include lawyers scared to death of a lawsuit it’s amazing that so many are finally doing it. If you create a blog, your own page on MySpace, or perhaps a short video that’s publicly available on YouTube, you open yourself up for anyone to post their opinion and to forward that to their contacts. It’s a viral risk you take. It’s a risk with a lot of reward potential though.

Hey, if you don’t want to go as far as creating your own blog, then how about supporting one that’s doing a good job and focused on your industry? I don’t know too many professional bloggers like me who would turn down an offer to advertise or sponsor some content or coverage of your event.

In fact, that’s become one of the main sources of our company revenue. I travel to conventions and company events and write about them on my blogs or on my sponsors’ blogs. Who would have thought this would even be possible just a few short years ago?

I’m convinced that the companies that are joining in the online conversation are the ones developing more loyal customers. I’ve already covered the benefits of a company blog that has regular and frequent posts so I’m not going to go over them again. But instead let’s look at some statistics about how many people are using some of these social networking sites and services.

Let’s take MySpace first. According to Wikipedia, there were more than 100 million registered accounts at the end of last year and it was the third most popular Web site by visits in the United States. Going to the same source, YouTube has 20 million visitors a month and over 100 million video clips are viewed daily. Facebook, which has been mostly focused on the college crowd, had more than 17 million registered users as of last month. I didn’t find any recent statistics on how many text messages are sent in a year, but it was more than 500 billion worldwide at the end of 2004. After looking at one of my daughter’s last phone bills, I’m sure it’s way more than that now.

From a commercial business standpoint, I hope you’ll agree that the level of activity represented by the online social networking phenomenon suggests that this is an area of opportunity to get your message out and into the conversation. v

Chuck Zimmerman is the president of ZimmCom New Media in Holts Summit. You can see his blog at www.zimmcomm.biz. He can be reached at [email protected]