I was having a pretty good day today – weather is pretty nice, had some very good client meetings and viewed some TV spots that our creative team produced that were unbelievable… But then reality hit me when I saw this -
Man, I knew I work a lot, but NO friends??? But let’s get serious – how can you keep up with this Social website thing? Everyday some new site is popping up and I just don’t have enough time in the day to keep up with my Facebook Page. Now there is Bing, Bebo, Twitter, fixster, tagged, linkedin, classmates, blackplanet, yuku, friendster, xanga, and even one named tickle (I’m not even going to try and type that in my browser -I’m pretty sure my IT department has blocked any site with the word tickle in it). And that’s only a few of the hundreds available today.
I have two questions – 1) “Is social media out of control?” and 1) “Is this a fad or should my clients be participating?”
Social media has been out of control since everyone saw Mark Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook) go from computer geek to Internet God in the matter of a semester. If he could do it, why can’t I? He didn’t just create a way for people to communicate together; he created a way that allowed potential consumers to opt-in to a marketing tool without even knowing it.
Not to mention that he created this at a time when you had a better chance of your potential customer winning American Idol than actually receiving and opening your email on his or her computer. Now you have children as young as 13 and as old as 110 spending hours at a time viewing targeted ads on Facebook’s site. People now “Tweet” their daily life routines and, in return, receive a sales announcement from Shaq, who, of course, sent it to them personally from his Twitter. On top of it all, you have a bunch of people building virtual lives on kaneva.com, dreaming about the day they will actually have a shiny car in real life, not even realizing that a Big Car company paid for their virtual car to be an option in their “Second Life.”
So, should your company use social media to sell more products or to push a service? What part of the above did you miss? People are going crazy over this stuff and most of it’s free!!! Let me say that again – F-R-E-E. Yes, you can spend money on Facebook Ads or Banner ads, but you can also just take advantage of the viral/networking side at no cost. Build a LinkedIn page for your company, set up a Twitter account that you can use to inform your current or potential clients of a promotion, or just simply have your sales reps link up with old friends/potential clients on fubar.com – come on it’s an online bar, these people are gullible and easy targets!
It might not be your business plan, but hey, didn’t you write that business plan before Gore invented the internet? Times are changing…don’t get caught without any “friends”, both real and virtual. One thing’s for sure – I’m sure your competition won’t!!!
