The Business of Being Social

Want to learn how to be as social as you can in your business? The Business of Being Social is SBT’s Book of The Month, giving excellent advice on how to best communicate with your customers…

With social media having a huge impact on how businesses communicate with their customers, digital experts Michelle Carvill and David Taylor are here to guide businesses in harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and a host of other social media networks.

The Second Edition of The Business of Being Social, published by Crimson, teaches businesses how to: create a viable, integrated and manageable social media strategy, understand the newer platforms, manage effective social advertising campaigns and grow a vibrant community on all relevant social media platforms and use them to understand a target audience.

Sussex Business Times is giving away two copies of this must-have book. Read on for a tempting extract, followed by details of the competition.

Extract from The Business of Being Social:

Becoming an Adaptive Social Business:

Before you embark on any social media campaign it is vital that proper planning is done in your business.

Most people still view social media as being the preserve of the marketing department or press office, when in reality many areas of the business – including research and development, customer service, supply chain management, IT, internal communications, human resources, recruitment and sales – are impacted by social media.

Whether you are a small or medium enterprise, microbusiness, public body or large corporation, you clearly need to have the right approach to embracing digital technology if you are going to achieve your business objectives. This means becoming a truly adaptive organisation that is ready to meet the challenges and opportunities posed by today’s ‘always connected’ customer.

To ensure that, as an organisation, you embrace social media activity effectively across different functions, we have developed a simple six-step plan that will help you reorganise your business and help you ultimately to achieve three key objectives:

1. Increase your profits
2. Lower your costs
3. Ensure a long-term future for your business.

 

Get your business strategy right:

The first step on the path to creating a modern, ‘social’ business is to have a proper strategy in place: not a social strategy, or even a marketing strategy, but an overarching business strategy that will help you guide your organisation into the future. It is important to Plan, Listen, Analyse before you Engage.

This takes the planning process a level deeper – right to the very heart of your company.

Why is this important? Aside from the fact that every organisation, from the smallest sole trader to the largest international body, needs to have a cohesive strategy in place, in the new social age it is harder to ‘wing it’ and muddle along. As we’ve seen, social media now affects so many parts of an organisation. Failure to plan at the outset could result in your business stagnating or even failing altogether.

While most firms will have a one- or two-year plan, few have a long-term vision for their business – which is important when technological advances mean that the world is changing so rapidly. Sole traders may want to think about their exit strategy; medium-sized enterprises may be eyeing expansion; while large corporations will be thinking about shareholder returns.

Next comes an understanding of your target audience(s). In the past, when there were only a handful of ways to communicate with customers, this was fairly simple. However, now that there are so many channels to communicate with – traditional, online, social networks, social messaging sites, forums – it is imperative that you have a plan for reaching people in the way in which they prefer to be communicated with.

 

How different generations, use traditional channels:

They will take a paid-for newspaper daily, listen to the wireless and watch terrestrial television. They may even happily accept cold calls and take time to read printed material sent to them through the post. However, a sizeable proportion of these people are starting to use social media.

Next up are the Baby Boomers, aged between 50 and 70. Most of the leaders in the country – whether in politics, education or business – fall into this age group and they split neatly into those who prefer the old ways of doing business (they think more like Veterans) and those who understand the old Darwinian ‘adapt or die’ principle. This is where issues can start to arise in companies: while the ‘old guard’ refuse to change their marketing and communications strategies, instead relying on tried and trusted methods, younger executives and marketing professionals become increasingly frustrated as they try to sell their new ideas to people who just don’t want to listen.

However, a recent survey by Forrester found that over half of over-65s are on Facebook and many regularly use social networks to communicate with friends, families and colleagues. Equally, many industry leaders are now prepared to blog, tweet or network via LinkedIn.

Within this group, it all comes down to mind-set, which we’ll cover shortly. We then come to the Generation Xers, people who, like the co-authors, were born between 1964 and 1979. This group is the last generation ever to read paid-for newspapers on a regular basis; we make up the median age group on Facebook; we’ve adapted quickly to new ways of working; and we’ve used email for most of our working lives. Yet even within this age group there are still many people who yearn for the pre-BlackBerry days when work was limited to an eight-hour day and you knew where you stood with communications. And many of these people are now senior managers!