Social Media, as Easy as 1, 2 … uh, What Comes After 2?

Should you company be involved with communicating in social media? yes, no, maybe

It sounds like a note to a grade school crush, but the reality is there is no definitive answer. The answer generally ends up as, it depends.

In a blog post by Shannon Paul, she lays out questions that you’re company must honestly answer before leaping into social media participant. A lot of the answers still follow the traditional preaching of you need to be where your customers are. Are your customers on Facebook, Twitter, networking communities, or other various s

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ocial sites. If you can answer yes to any of the mentioned sites than you should be listening to what the customers are saying about you.

Once you have established where your customers are and what they are saying about you – now what? Well, you need to answer more questions:

How can you benefit the conversation?

How open are you willing to be with your customers?

Can you produce the content to make the experience beneficial?

it seems easy enough, but these are the steps you need to prepare for when the time comes to sail off into social waters. The tolerance level is not as high as you would expect for poor conversation, poor content, and lack of transparency.

Social media resources are great assets to a company that can use them right and can add real value to the conversation. Your customers will appreciate it and they will make sure other appreciate it to. The key – be honest with yourself.

Integrating Social Media and Education

Last week I spoke with a class of public relations students at the local university on how social media will affect them and it was astonishing to see how little social media was being taught. Like most college students you hope the content you’re learning will translate into practical work knowledge, but elements do get skipped over. Unfortunately for these students of PR this is not an element they can afford to skip over.

In this state of media college students can’t afford to miss out on an important social media skill set. When everyone is expected to be an expert of social media and understand the proper uses the up-and-coming work force needs to have a leg up. Then I came across an article on Social Computing Magazine that gives a good introduction to pass along to the learners of the PR trade. It’s not comprehensive, but it can give a foundation to learn and research from and hopefully gain understanding.

Hopefully I will have another chance to talk with these particular students and see how they move forward. I am even more hopeful the University will see what is being missed and add social media to the curriculum, so these students will join the workforce prepared.