I am fed up with seeing courses and ideas about ‘Social Media’ touted around trying to persuade businesses that it’s a universal panacea, and, if you come on this course, new customers will come flooding to you.     

  Bo***cks

Social media is just new technology that can be used effectively or ineffectively.

·         It’s  just a new way of spreading reputation about your business or people from person to person, not controlled by you.

·         It's word of mouth that spreads electronically around the world at the speed of light.

·         The key thing that has changed is that it can spread to millions of people in an instant (whereas, before it could only spread slowly from person to person)

·         It’s also a new way of listening for new (and existing) customer needs (and responding  to them to build sales)

This is a great opportunity and a great threat.

A great opportunity, because, if you get it right, you can build business very profitably and quickly at very little cost.

A great threat, because this is out of your control, and if you get it wrong, word-of-mouth about how bad you are will spread to all your customers and potential customers very quickly.

(To address this issue I would recommend that every company has a proven, simple, effective system to deliver outstanding customer experiences consistently and excellently: the system I would recommend is ' great or poor’)

So how can you use it effectively?

What are the key things that would make someone talk about you or your business behind your back for the right reasons?

1.       The first reason (about 33%) is: emotional engagement: the product or experience is so good that the customer feels compelled to share their feelings about it.

2.       The second reason (about 25%) is: sharing knowledge or expertise: people like to share things that prove they are knowledgeable or have inside information.

3.       The third reason (about 20%) is: involvement: people like to share things in order to be pleasant and help other people.

4.       The fourth reason (about 20%) is: message-involvement: the message is so humorous or pleasant that they feel compelled to share it.

Of course, this is only one side of the coin: people also share bad experiences for the same reasons; and remember, people are three or four times more likely to share bad experiences as they are to share good experiences!

So you've got to get it right:

·         you've got to get your customer experiences right: or else people will share things about you that will ruin your business.

·         you've got to get the message in your social media right: or else nothing good about your business will be shared: you could be the best kept secret in your marketplace (which is no use to anyone)