Word on the tweet
1 Feb 10
Guy Clapperton explains why social media such as Twitter and Facebook can be valuable business tools in the professional world
by Guy Clapperton
Toast and coffee, if you must know. We’re talking about social media here, so I thought I’d better get the “what did you have for breakfast?” question out of the way first. Everybody thinks that’s what Twitter, Facebook and other social media consist of, so that’s what we’ll do, right?
This is where a lot of people go wrong and write social media off as something they won’t be able to use. It is, the caricatures in so much of the press say, a bunch of Z-list celebrities and wannabes telling you about their every move (which you don’t want to know about anyway), a simple platform for untrammelled egos which have persuaded themselves that they actually matter.
I’m not here to say there is none of that on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Of course it’s a feature of them – it exists and it would be absurd to claim otherwise. It would be wrong to write these new networks off as a result, though. In the same way that the Internet itself was populated early on by a lot of sites saying “Hi, I’m Larry and this is my dog”, there are a lot of people using social networks for waving at their mates, trying to attract the attention of celebrities and announcing inanities like what they had for breakfast.
But like the early Web, there are already examples of people using networks constructively and helping their business as a result.
The irrelevant ones
The American Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal. The thing is, some are better suited to some tasks than others; readers of this magazine would probably not have gone more than a couple of rounds with Muhammad Ali at his peak, and he wouldn’t have been able to complete my tax return for me.
In the same way, various social networks exist for various purposes and the fact that I’m going to recommend against using a number of them doesn’t mean they’re “lesser” networks, but that they’re not suited to the aim of picking up new clients or servicing existing ones.
Frequently, this is because they are aimed at a specific audience. For the purpose of this article we’ll be ignoring the music and movie-oriented Myspace, music networks such as Spotify and anything that doesn’t have an obvious professional bent.
The ones you want
Professionals tend to use Twitter for short messages, LinkedIn for networking and Facebook. The latter is often seen as more “social” than professional, but it is also home to a number of interest groups from a particular profession. In spite of the headlines, it still has more members than Twitter.
Joining is straightforward and it will check your contact book for other members. It is flexible: you can set up groups (which is useful when you want to make an announcement or send out a reminder) and start discussions which are easy to follow as comments are published sequentially.
It’s vital to publicise these through means other than social media initially – there is, for example, a group on Facebook as I type dedicated to self-assessment. This should be an ideal place to find new clients – except that it has only two members.
Twitter is purely text-based and, famously, accepts messages only up to 140 characters. You can make announcements, but these will only be seen by those who have chosen to follow you or by people searching Twitter for terms that match those in your message or “tweet”. In the meantime, you can engage with people you are following, responding to their messages and offering help (building goodwill is by far the best way to increase your following) and perform searches for relevant posts about services you offer.
One example: a Twitter member was having trouble with his MYOB package, which wouldn’t change the date from the previous day, and he wanted to send invoices out. He vented his frustration on Twitter and within three minutes – literally – MYOB had Tweeted back, saying this happened when the program was running overnight so closing down and restarting would cure the problem.
It worked, and within minutes he was Tweeting about remarkable customer service – so a critic was turned into an advocate. Thousands would have read his testimonial.
LinkedIn is a more sober network. Business oriented, few people will say what they had for breakfast on here unless they have linked their updates to their other networks. The idea is to use it to meet people through intermediaries who know someone – it’s the classic rule of six degrees of separation. You might want the editor of CA Magazine’s autograph, for example, but don’t know him, so you look at my profile on LinkedIn, see that he’s known to me, so you write to me asking me to forward the message.
It should be a good way of cutting down on timewasters and prequalifying new contacts, although recently its effectiveness has been diluted with the announcement of a premium version that will allow members to contact people direct when they don’t know them.
The results can be spectacular. Elsewhere in this article, we speak to an accountant who has built a business mainly using the new networks. ICAS has also entered the world of social media. The Institute has a Facebook group for CAPELLA, the CA student society, and a LinkedIn group for members.
Your staff and the cyber-world
So much for an introduction to your self-promotion on social networks; the other issue is your staff’s use of them. There are a number of areas in which it’s quite possible to find your corporate voice coming adrift. The first has received a lot of coverage, the so-called “cyber-skiving”. In other words, people can spend lots of time on Facebook or Twitter when they should be working and this is frustrating to a manager.
It’s worth pulling back in the first instance to ask whether they are indeed working. If they have a Tweetdeck column open with “self-assessment” as a search term in real time in early January and are responding to everyone complaining about form-filling with a breezy “can we help?”, then they could be building a considerable amount of goodwill and new business. Or they could be speculating on why Jonathan Ross resigned, which is where the problem starts.
At this point, it’s a good idea to take a two-pronged approach. First, accept that this is a management issue rather than a technical one. The malingerer who now spends all of their time chatting to friends on Facebook is no different from the one who spent all her time organising her social life on the phone in office hours, or checking the Time Out website to plan his evening out, or standing by the coffee machine for unreasonable amounts of time. The medium has changed, the people and your best approach haven’t.
So attacking the motivation problem is one possibility, and restricting the time people may spend using their computers for personal use is another.
A variant is when people’s personal and professional lives overlap. Retail giant Tesco noted a year or so ago that its staff had set up a Facebook area where they could relax and exchange good practice and suchlike. This saved Tesco some money, funnily enough, since it might otherwise have had to put something on its own Intranet. All was good until someone put up a question about the smartest put-downs staff had ever offered customers (a personal favourite being “No, I don’t work here, I just saw this look on the Milan catwalk and had to have it”). Clearly this sent out the wrong sort of message to the customer, who might have found the pages in a search.
Even more subtly, the staff of a particular satellite navigation manufacturer were on Twitter in their own right, and were very excited about some new features they were putting in. They Twittered and Facebooked eagerly – months before the new devices were due on the market, and inadvertently sent out the message that it wasn’t worth buying any just yet. The public relations executive was faced with the dilemma of wanting to harness the enthusiasm without appearing like a control freak of some sort.
Vastly less subtle was the overenthusiastic marketing executive of a low-budget airline who set up a Twitter account using the company’s logo and name. He then used it simply to tell everyone who got in touch that people who used Twitter or blogs for results were – actual quote here – “retards”. The page was up for only an hour but it damaged the business (which I won’t name because it took action immediately and shouldn’t suffer any further).
The curious thing about many of these instances of misuse of social networks is that they were probably covered by existing contracts. No competent employer issues a contract without stipulating something about maintaining confidentiality, and this rule applies on social networks just as it would in a pub. Likewise, every contract of employment your correspondent has ever seen has something to say about bringing an employer into disrepute.
It may be a good idea to remind employees that the rules apply in the new media as well as the old; it may be worth drafting something new if you don’t think your existing regime is watertight in the new environment.
The experience of Elaine Clark (see case study, p30) with social networks is instructive in more ways than one. Clearly, it’s textbook stuff on getting out on to the right networks, being selective, remaining professional rather than personal and building a business rapidly as a result.
It’s also an object lesson in not being too sure that your customers won’t be on certain networks. Clark mentions she stays off YouTube and yes, there are a lot of videos of kids falling over, dogs standing up and singing Scotland the Brave (or whatever) and frankly illegal copies of copyright video. But there are also very professional uses of that particular network. Last October, Google hosted an event on cloud computing, filmed the whole thing and put it online in chunks. In the week I drafted this article, Internet provider Easynet Connect launched a new product and put a video straight onto YouTube to promote it. Nowhere did anyone say this was other than wholly professional.
Assumptions can actually do a lot of damage to success on social media. It’s worth finishing with a brief anecdote about when I was commissioned to write my book, This Is Social Media, aimed at the small business proprietor. This was in late 2008 and I was explaining it to my mother-in-law. I started with a general chat on what social media actually was, and she interrupted very quickly: “Yes, I’ve seen your Facebook page, not making much use of it, are you…”
Scary but valuable, as it blew my preconceptions away and I haven’t taken it for granted that anyone will or won’t be on a particular network since.
GUY CLAPPERTON is a freelance journalist specialising in IT and business issues. His book This is Social Media is published by Capstone (£12.99). CA Magazine readers can purchase it for £9 plus P&P from www.wiley.com/go/thisissocialmedia (enter promotion code VA660 at the checkout).