Social Media

The new social media is not, at first, comfortable for a lot of us. The further you dig into it, however, the more comfortable and (actually) exciting it is. Your first Twitter send will be a bit stiff; your first Facebook comment a bit formal; your first YouTube instruction video will feel intrusive. Before you know it, you’ll be off and running. If not, check in with a 15-23 year old and they’ll be glad to get your comfort level up.

Today’s New York Times has a feature on mom-and-pop businesses turning to social media, especially Twitter. For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. Since small businesses grow half their customers through word of mouth, Twitter is the perfect avenue for spreading the word. “Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter…” New York Times, July 23, 2009.

In Groundswell, a 2008 book on how businesses can win in this evolving world of social technologies, the authors note that the groundswell of social media and self-organized information transfer is like any other human activity. If you understand it, you can work within it and even thrive in it. It just takes knowledge, experience and enlightenment to get there. The book offers a great introduction to the entire social media world. But more than that, it covers why you should care about it. “Online entrepreneurs are highly competitive, and speed can create a dominant edge because whoever gets to an idea first gets first crack at the visitors (and traffic)…Online, people can switch behaviors as soon as they see something better…” (Groundswell, p. 12).

This groundswell, crowdswell, crowdsourcing or digital swarm (however you want to refer to the phenomenon) has transformed the way business is conducted. Social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, Linked-In, and Twitter, as well as blogs and the mother lode for any business, your website, can be powerful tools in sales, marketing, recruitment, and opportunity identification.

There are workshops all over town introducing people to the new social media and how to use it for business. I attended Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy (NoCoEntre.net) and by the time the workshop was finished, barriers to understanding, appreciating and using the new social media had broken down completely. I was sold, because I finally understood it.

I’ve been ordering social media books for the library business collection. Check us out at: http://read.poudrelibraries.org/adult/business/ .

Have a great summer weekend.