The commercial benefits of social media

My name is John, I am 58 years old and I was not a social media user. This was not something I was proud of. In fact I was a little bit ashamed. I did not tell anyone, of course. Not even my work colleagues. In fact I would happily join in any marketing conversation about the latest trending issues, openings statistics and discuss reach rates with the best of them. But I was hurting inside.

There was an ugly truth behind all my bluster. I thought, deep down, social media was all a bit silly. After all, who cares if celebrity A has had a nose-job or pop star B has taken up yoga? These are people I would never meet or choose to read about. The whole social media thing seemed a bit of a confidence trick which mainly benefited the paid-for media and famous people in their search for their next starring role. No-one in marketing knew I felt like this except me. I was not in a good place, promotionally speaking. Marketing-wise, it was a lonely place to be.

The longest journey starts with the smallest step…

And then, one dark December day, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was time to do something about it. Surely hundreds of millions of people couldn’t all be wrong and only I could be right. So I started to tweet, in a small way at first. Then I posted stuff on Facebook, dabbled in Pinterest and Instagram and before you know it, I had recovered my zeal and zest for life and my self-esteem. Now my business uses social media all the time.

What’s more, we sell the management of social media to other people…because it works, commercially, emotionally and personally. How did I kick the habit of ignoring social media and finally get with the programme? As usual with things that change your life, I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, there was something in it after all. The only way I would know would be to try it out for myself and see what might happen.

So this story is for all those older unbelievers out there who thought and perhaps still think that social media isn’t for them. And that if you wait for long enough perhaps it will all go away. It won’t.

First, some numbers

I knew the statistics, of course. An early report by Universal McCann in 2008 showed that some 400 million people between the ages of 14-54 regularly watched video clips online, 248 million uploaded and shared photographs online and 184 million penned blogs in 2008. Of course, the numbers would be much bigger by now. The numbers were a little misleading though as there are seven billion humans on this good Earth so in that context, half a billion digital users did not seem significant to me at the time.

But the 2013 International Telecoms Union World Report revealed that more than a third of the world’s population is now online, in one form or another.

You can’t get connected though without having the right technology in the first place. According to a UN Agency Report there will be more mobile phone subscriptions in the world than people by the end of 2014 – that’s over seven billion or more handsets. The combination of large numbers of people wanting to connect and the devices to do it with, have resulted in a virtual explosion in connectivity that is now difficult to ignore, even for an old curmudgeon like me.

So it was inevitable that such an all-pervading phenomenon would have business consequences, even if some businesses like ours were choosing to ignore it. We started to look at our own marketing to corporate customers to see what would happen if we took a different approach and actually included social media in the mix.

Let’s talk it over

After all, as a consulting agency, what we wanted, deep down, was to be able to have a friendly conversation with our potential clients from time to time, without having to necessarily sell them something or be constantly hanging around in their reception areas or on golf courses. Opening a friendly, non-threatening, digital channel seemed to be a sensible strategy.

Brian Solis, the US ‘evangelist’ of all things social media put it succinctly:

‘Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers.’

So we became ‘publishers’ and started to create and distribute our corporate stories to anyone who would listen. The aim was simply to get some semi-commercial conversations going that did not involve expensive, paid-for media advertising or overt product marketing.