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The Why and How of Social Media Participation
Join The Conversation.
We’ve all heard this phrase hundreds of times relative to social media, but what exactly does that
mean? Why is this all worth our time, and what can we get out of it as a business? Let’s have a look
at some of the compelling rationale behind engaging in the social web, and the basic steps to doing
it well.
Why Does This Matter?
Simply put: the social web is here, whether you like it or not. It’s changing perceptions about business,
giving individual people powerful voices of change and impact (for better or worse), and it’s compelling
companies to change their mindset about how they get their message out to the people that are
relevant to their business.
Shorter attention spans, information overload, the abundance of mobile technology, and our need for
instant, personalized information means that the social web has massive power to connect people, to
share relevant information faster, and to make irrelevant the “cast a wide net” approach we’ve used
from everything from customer service to marketing to PR to recruiting for the last several decades.
Instead, we can be refined. Targeted. Find smaller audiences that are much more likely to care about
what we’re doing instead of settling for single-digit conversion rates on our outreach activities. Locate
our advocates and learn what makes them tick. Uncover our critics and learn about how we can
improve their experiences and conceptions of what we are. Hear how the industry is changing around
us and where our role in that change might be.
Customer expectations have changed, and how business interact with their customers online is
changing too.
Want some compelling statistics? Have a look at this video by Erik Qualman and some of the hard
numbers illustrating the impact of the social web.
Have A Plan.
When you’ve done the foundation work of building a listening strategy, you’re ready to make a case for
participation, and actually engaging w