As we await David Cameron, Gordon Brown or someone else to form the next UK government, it’s interesting to see how the parties have used social networking for the election campaign:
What lessons can be learned for business? Is it worthwhile?
- All the major parties have used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube videos. None of these services were more than a glimmer of an idea at the last election in 2005
- Only the Conservatives and Labour have had a Facebook application that prompts visitors to forward a voting message to their friends. In both cases this was set up as the “landing page” tab that visitors first see
- Only Labour placed their “Follow us on” icons prominently in the top right hand corner. Most others hid them down out of sight when people visit the home page
- Only Labour and UKIP appeared to offer an RSS feed, which allows people to see news updates as they are issued, through services such as NetVibes
- Only the Conservatives used any other services (itunes, delicious and livestream)
It remains to be discovered whether use of these services made much difference to the outcome in each seat. But conversely none of the parties wanted to look “behind the curve” in not using these new tools.
So how are businesses using these and other social networking services? It’s fair to say many businesses are still hanging back to evaluate not only the benefits, but also the potential risks. But is it time to make a move? Or is doing nothing still a viable option?
Services such as Facebook and Twitter come from a “consumer” background, on which people typically register in their capacity as an individual. These services are therefore ideally suited to mass marketing of products and services that are bought by consumers (B2C).
But that doesn’t mean hard sell. Dell’s landing page on Facebook is about “Plant a tree for a friend”. Marmite’s is the “Love Party” manifesto appealing to Marmite lovers to spread the word amongst their friends.
In the B2B space, Logicalis (which supplies IT products and services) has a Facebook link on their home page which immediately prompts you to share their logo and web address with your friends, with whatever comment you want to add. That could of course be positive or negative! They also have links to StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit to help “spread the word”. Their Twitter account is active to announce events, awards, white papers and the like, but there’s no link from their home page.
Another common feature is the RSS feed. As mentioned above, this allows people to receive news updates as they are published, through services such as NetVibes. RSS is an alternative to an “email alert service”, which can still be offered.
So should you be following suit? Not necessarily, but it’s worth considering these ideas:
(1) Registering company and brand names
Do you remember domain name pirates, who would register company and brand names and then charge for those businesses to take them? Recovering the names without paying the fee can be difficult, time-consuming and not guaranteed. Better to register what you want first. There’s a similar situation with social network sites. For example:
Twitter usernames (that appear in the “tweet” messages) are unique across the world. So British Airways has registered both BritishAirways and British_Airways.
Facebook lets you register a business in a variety of forms - businesses, brands, products groups and communities. Ordinarily page names are not unique, so can be added at any time. However that means that others can also register your names at any time, so it’s worth periodically checking if anything inappropriate is happening. (Note that unique addresses in the form www.facebook.com/name are available if you wish)
(2) Reactive usage
Obviously you don’t have to have any social networking registration for your business, brands and products to be mentioned in people’s postings!
Some people are saying that they get a faster response to a complaint if they publish it on something like Twitter than by ringing customer services. Increasingly businesses are monitoring what is being said about them, so at least they get the chance to respond.
(3) Pro-active usage
Clearly the main usage of social networking by businesses is for marketing. Some examples are above.
For Facebook, once a person “likes” your site, by default they can post a comment on your “wall”. The comment could be good or bad (and that’s the risk!). However it is possible to turn off this update capability if you don’t want comments or posts.
In addition, businesses are finding other uses for social networking. For example, for IT support, using Twitter to let users log support requests.
Proactive uses will be explored further in future posts.
IN CONCLUSION
So is social networking useful or a waste of time? It’s certainly not something that can be ignored. Individual websites may come and go. But the human desire to communicate means that some form of social networking will remain with us.
How your business needs to use social networking, reactively or proactively, depends on the business. But at the very least a presence is worthwhile, even if only to reserve your brand names.
