Community
RedShift Community Building Program: The Power of Social Media
RedShift Social Media-Network Model for Business
Businesses of all sizes have been grappling with the ongoing shift in marketing power from supplier to customer and in knowledge control from employer to employee/channel partners. The world has become increasingly connected and Web 2.0 ubiquitous. Many who have responded to these shifts by escalating traditional methods including push advertising (spam), discounting and automated enterprise cost-cutting systems, are now seeing those responses as ineffective or zero-sum games.
“We are the people formerly known as the audience.”
- Jay Rosen on Social Media
Solo, small and large businesses need to make this shift now, and immediately start perceiving customers, clients, consumers and channel partners in a new way. Serving and sharing, not selling, must be the objective of your “conversation with your community”. That often requires a leap of faith that your desired results will follow.
Understandably, clients want to know what the return will be on their investment in social media and community building. This “need to know” frequently leads to an early on focus on stats and tracking and links and investment in ad words and SEO. Its a popular approach, it may be the correct approach but it should not be considered the best approach for everyone. In most cases, quality of content, dialog, degree of participation and attention drive value, not quantity of links and clicks. To be influential and gain “attention share” you need to understand, be useful in and be live in..your networks.
In social media, there is no direct link between what you do and what you get for it. Your ability to value your social capital, community and relationships requires experiential learning unique to your business. And it requires patience. The sooner you start, the faster you’ll learn what works, and what doesn’t. That learning in itself is of tremendous value over the long term and is the pre-requisite phase to actionable metrics.
Despite the learning curve, the long-term benefits of social network strategy should not be underestimated and include expanded:
- Awareness of your brand.
- Social capital which is like goodwill in the conceptual, connected world.
- Your continually evolving sense of: what your community members value, how you can dialog with them, how you will evolve and change “with” them.
What
- One-stop creative services including: social media strategy, writing, editing, graphics creation, site planning, architecture/template, project management, coaching/facilitation.
- Personal and business coaching to insure that content and community development efforts and actions are aligned differentiated identity and with desired results.
- Social networking product and platform evaluation and recommendations.
- A social media RO(n)I framework.
Why?
- Sharing everything feels very uncomfortable.
- There’s a company-wide lack of engagement with your internal knowledge sharing and collaboration systems.
- Your traffic is down, your competition has raised the bar and you don’t know what’s Web 2.0 hype and what’s real.
- You’re open to the potential value of both external and internal social networks but the ROI and the change issues are unclear.
- You’re ready to invest the time, effort and energy in social media, but have only a lot of dis-jointed ideas, opinions and voices.