Social Media

The book I read to research this post was The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Social media takes 3 major forms which are blogging, microblogging & social networking. Many large companies employ people who surf the internet, mainly social media sites, but they look for any mentions of their company on the net & maybe answer any questions. We are going into an age where people distrust the traditional corporate messages. Instead when people are looking to buy something they often either ask their friends on social networking sites or they will look for reviews on the internet. We are going into a situation where even one disgruntled customer can do serious damage to a company via things like bulletin boards & forms of social media. If something damaging is posted about your company you need to answer it as soon as possible & look at damage limitation. If you are a small company looking to market yourself on social media, it's probably a good idea to get an employee who already uses a website like twitter & enjoys it. Failing that look at getting someone to do it like an employees partner, in any case it should be someone who understands your business. You should consider doing a podcast which shouldn't be longer than 10 minutes & it's a must to put it on itunes although I have heard they are very strict about what they accept. You can do a video log or vlog I think the thing here is to catch the viewers attention maybe make it humorous. I think sites like youtube are a must. A company which sold food mixers did a video showing an iphone being crunched up by one & sold all their stocks in 24 hours, not to mention all the exposure they had when people viewed the video.