Think that social media has nothing to offer your “traditional” business? I can give you reasons along any of three points of view: velocity, flexibility, and economy. As our tools come closer and closer to approximating and/or enhancing human interaction, and further away from requiring an abundance of technological expertise, those who are exploring and sampling these tools are at an advantage that can be measured in speed, adaptability, and cost of operation.
We aren’t talking about the marketing department. We aren’t equipping PR professionals. This isn’t a new set of tools for launching campaigns. These are tools to improve interaction, and they are incredibly powerful and game-changing when you consider how much less impact on traditional business resources most of these solutions have.
Velocity
In the United States, in 2008, a “smart” cellular phone costs as little as $150 USD for the device, and under $50 for an account with a data plan. Wifi hotspots are on the rise. A reasonably good laptop can be purchased for under $500 with built-in wireless capabilities. With these two types of units as the base system, we can deliver the following capabilities:
- Instant communication in voice, text, email, photo,video, and even geo-locative.
- Information browsing, including SMS-based and voice search (Google).
- Presence status information (Twitter, dodgeball, jaiku, pownce)
- Shared documents (Google docs)
- Voice Conferencing (freeconferencecall.com and tons more)
- Access to thousands of web-stored applications and data.
All without a cubicle. All without an office, an office manager, any infrastructure whatsoever. We can work out of coffee shops and libraries, at hotels and in the upstairs office, on the side of the road, or across the globe. Fast.
Flexibility
As recently as five years ago, we considered which software our organizations would buy based on the operating systems we supported. (Maybe yours still does.) Before that, we had to choose between Token Ring and Ethernet. Beta and VHS. (Now there’s Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but you’re not falling for that, right?). Today, we are flexible. There are some considerations to be had, but with so many applications running in the cloud, accessible through browsers, so much of what we choose to equip ourselves with is a personal choice, and is a matter of our Internet access more than any other deciding factor.
- Office apps via Google or Zoho, or desk versions from OpenOffice
- Operating Systems for free with Ubuntu (and hundreds of other Linux distributions), or irrelevant with the browser being our true compatibility choice.
- Collaboration through wikis, shared spaces like Facebook, or in Ning communities.
- Conversations across multiple Instant Messaging vendors via Adium, or Trillium or Meebo
- Blog on Wordpress, blogger, movable type, vox, whatever.
- Instant databases through Freebase.com or Zoho
- File storage through Box.net and so many more
- Video hosting from Revver, Blip.tv, Brightcove, YouTube
We can choose from any number of sources, mix and match. Flexibility is abundant. You don’t have to choose what your neighbor chooses. Email can be gmail, yahoo, and whatever else. Just use a domain forwarding/pop3 scheme to keep consistency to external sources.
Economy
Why pay for it when you can use it for free? Cost doesn’t insinuate reliability any more than free predicts uptime. Google is free and it is more diverse than any of your data centers. If you have to consider budget when considering social media, as with the rest of the premise, things fall back to the humans involved. Lots of companies are using ad-supported software models. Others are using services and add-ons and behind-the-firewall implementations to support their efforts. The point is still the same: you don’t have to pay anything (or much) to get into the game.
- Use Skype for free voice conversations (and cheap for SkypeOut)
- Use Wordpress.com for free blog hosting, or Blogger, or Vox, or Tumblr.
- Facebook is free. Twitter is free. Gmail is free. Google Docs are free.
- Wikis are free. Freebase is free. Zoho is free.
- STORAGE is cheap (not free) for people making media. Price out 500 Gigabytes of storage these days and you’ll see that it costs less than you used to pay for a box of floppies in the mid 90s.
There are other “costs” in retooling your business practices and the like. And yet, what’s the return? If you’re faster, more flexible, and have cost the company nothing in licensing, what have you hurt?
Beware those selling you “solutions” that are “more robust” than what’s out there. What’s out there is working just fine for lots of people. People out beating the street doing important things are using these free apps, these web-minded apps, these “you can’t always be connected to the Internet” apps.
What’s holding you back? What are the reasons you’re hearing for NOT using social computing technology to enhance the way people do business at your company?
(And yes, security will be one of the prime answers. Let’s hash that out in the comments section. What’s YOUR take?)
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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wow 5/5 comments above are from spam blogs…
I think it would be great to have an example of how these social networking sites have been used successfully.
Thinking of traditional, let me take you all back to 1993, when I started my first limited company…
1) We could only run one application at a time on our DOS-based computer, which cost the equivalent of $2500.
2) We got a ‘fast’ modem that transferred data at 56Kb/sec (on a good day) in 1995.
3) We had to advertise our business in directories and through direct mail and telesales to even register the fact that we existed to the outside world.
4) We had to buy a software licence for every computer user to just type a letter, and our first laser printer cost over $3000.
5) All our work arrived and left by post or courier, all our notifications by telephone, and we paid $800+ a month for a city centre office to give us credibility.
6) We had to advertise at networking events and attend trade shows to register the fact that we existed or had some benefits.
7) Most of our work came from within 100 miles of our office.
8) We were often asked what our web site was for in 1995.
And now, 2008, 15 years later.
1) $700 laptop runs all that is needed.
2) 20MB broadband with wifi means I can work from my kitchen.
3) We have not spent a penny on advertising in traditional media since 1999, and custom driven by a blog and light activity on social networks are only beaten by referrals from customers.
4) We use free software for Word Processing, Presentations, Email, Web Browsing.
5) All our work arrives and leaves digitally by email, IM or FTP, and we are as likely to acknowledge by Skype or Twitter as by phone. Two exceptions last year incoming, seven outgoing as a physical seal / affidavit was needed. We don’t need to rent an office, or all spend time and money commuting any more - we rent a mailbox address for pennies. Latest printer cost less than $250.
6) We have revised our home page to ensure we don’t get time-wasting enquiries and emphasise that we are expensive. We only go to trade shows as visitors now.
7) Most of our work comes from people we never meet, most are more than 400 miles away.
8) We are often asked how much we pay for SEO / SEM for our web site - answer $0.
And the business? Translation. Secretarial work, if you boil it down. Now, it can all be done from the terrace overlooking the sea in Spain, or wrapped up in a log cabin in Switzerland or Omsk. We even swapped to Macs without our customers noticing.
Social computing and networkign has really set us free. We love being able to work from a hotel balcony in Mallorca, or check messages via a mobile while waiting for the groceries to be scanned in the supermarket.
Our costs and overheads are lower, we’re working smarter, not harder, and are no longer tied to our desks.
As for security - it’s really not an issue - and less of an issue than it ever was - even backups are online, which is intrinsically safer than any environment we could hope to create.
Daz Cox,
There is a great book out there with many specific examples of how these types of tools can be used to promote a business. It is called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meeerman Scott. I highly recommend it to anyone new to internet marketing. It really covers a lot of the information in Chris’ post but in more detail.
My first real job out of the Air Force was with one of the oldest, most respected manufacturer’s representative firms in the electronic component business, owned by one of the last of the old guard, Bob Trinkle.
Bob was fifty and I was half his age.
Bob liked to give new hires the office tour personally, taking particular pride the day of my tour in his new computer room, a darkish cave of a room behind tinted glass with accent lighting and six foot tall racks of equipment that made it look like something right out of a James Bond movie. The door whooshed open against the push of positive air pressure and the sounds of the office fell silent when the door sealed behind us.
He’d spent hundreds of thousands installing the climate controlled room and all the hardware. The Computer Room was sexier to Bob than Mrs. Trinkle and he acted like a little kid showing me a new bike.
At the conclusion of the walk-around Bob was guiding me back to my desk when he offhandedly motioned toward a closed door, describing it as the location of the new gym he was planning to install someday.
He pushed open the door to reveal boxes stacked floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
These were the printed backups to everything in the computer system. Bob explained that he’d developed a schedule over time to eliminate the printed backups as he gained more confidence in the system and magnetic storage media. A tech rep from the integrator came in three times a week whether he was needed or not just to make Bob feel safe and secure.
As a result of Bob’s investment in leading edge computer automation, Trinkle Sales, Inc. was the first rep firm in the US with the ability to provide point of sale data back to the manufacturers he represented, signaling the beginning of a new era of cooperation between representatives and distributors of electronic components. He was recognized and lauded by his industry, credited with singlehandedly kick starting the computerization of the electronics distribution business in North America.
1K DRAMS were on allocation that year and the industry was about to experience the bursting of the home PC bubble and its first real recession.
Bob Trinkle was a first adopting technology trendsetter in his industry in 1984, but he was still Afraid to completely let go of a technology that made him feel Secure–a technology that had worked flawlessly for the last fifty years. He was switching from something he could hold in his hands and see with his eyes to something he had to take on faith. Faith that the engineering behind this new technology was reliable and would be supported for the long haul.
Afraid of switching to technology we now take for granted.
Maybe businesses aren’t holding back quite as much as you think. Maybe what we’re seeing, Chris, is people holding onto the old while they test drive the new.
Holding on because it makes them feel Secure when they can see and touch because they’re Afraid to place their business’ critical data, and their faith, in the servers, the financial stability and the hands of companies and people they don’t even really know, and the technologies that connect them all.
The switchover from 1.0 to 2.0 is as significant and emotional for business owners as the switchover from ledgers to Excel, from fax to email and from mail based to web based transactions.
Detailed education, demonstration and live technical support will be critical to providing business with the Secure feeling they need to adopt Web 2.0 solutions.
I use Wrike for productivity and project management. It’s also free. Everyone in our team has got a free subscription and we collaborate on our tasks with the help of email. Wrike’s integrated with our inboxes. It’s really great. I think it would be interesting for you to check out http://www.wrike.com.
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