Within the enterprise, social media has often been too hastily dismissed as a[nother] fad and buzzword with dubious business value. We feel strongly that companies that fall into this facile categorization miss the whole point about its value. The rapid growth and utility of social media will ensure that it will become the dominant means for information distribution in the near future. It offers companies invaluable opportunities to reach stakeholders and their affinity communities in ways that were, until quite recently, simply unimaginable. In this post, we examine a number of ways in which companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange can use social media.
What is social media? Are social media and social networks the same thing? How can companies take advantage of these new channels and platforms? Where to begin? Is social media adoption limited to a certain demographic? Is social media about communication or about interaction? What makes it so innovative? How can the success of adoption be measured? We provide answers and guideposts to these.
At its core, social media is a toolset for sharing and participating in content across the web. The content is not the media. The social toolset may be visual, audio, textual or a combination of these. What makes social media so potentially influential are the distribution channels through which it allows for content to be shared. These distribution channels or social networks are what give social media their potency. The following video gives a concise description of what social media is.
It used to be that the obvious way to share information on the old web (Web 1.0), was via email, which by the way, still has a lot of valid uses. Back then, colleagues, friends and family would send out an email with a story or event of interest and copy several other people who may also be interested in that information. This method had some shortcomings:
Email is like walkie-talkie. It is designed for two-person communications. Even when many others are included in the Cc box, it is still a one to one communication. Email is not designed for group exchange.
Emails are ‘closed and invite-only’ by design. Emails are sent, not shared. This is not semantics but fundamental to the differences between the two. Even when a sender copies a thousand people in a email, it will still be limited to those who are in the loop. This also applies for newsletters that have a ‘Subscribe’ tool. Social media is public by default but can be set to private.
Emails are specific to a particular exchange not subject or theme. Communities do not gather around a single exchange. Rather they coalesce around a subject, theme or interest. Community is simply beyond email. Social networks are affinty communities. While emails can be sent to members of a community, the community must have been formed in the real world. On the contrary, a social network can form online and then extend offline. In fact, social networks, as the term is used here, are defined by their online nature, since they leverage on social media or social computing to nurture their organizing principles.
Emails have no central location for collating communications among all recipients. Emails may not be delivered to the recipient, go to spam or be deleted by accident.
Email recipients cannot manage participation in the ‘loop’. Social networks come with a customizable set of privacy and update settings.
Emails do not have reputational filtering mechanisms. Even after receiving 1,000 emails from a person on a particular issue, a recipient would still be ignorant about which other places where the sender has made comments or which other conversations of mutual interest the sender is following. Social networks have this important feature.
Emails do not engender sustaining conversations. Even when the contents of an email invite or stimulate feedback, these are at best ‘Reply’ and ‘Copy all’, and quickly become unwieldy when more than two persons are exchanging views.
Emails are passive by design to the recipient. One ‘receives’ email. One does not participate in email or its content. If members of a social network see themselves as simply recipients of missives from the community admin, then the community is really a non-community. Social communities exist because they encourage participation. They are defined by participation.
With emails, the sender can, by using Bcc, maintain a measure of control and censorship. In contrast, it’s impossible to do so with social media. Indeed, it would defeat the very purpose of social media if one could do so. If censorship becomes tedious and stifles the discussion, the community will migrate.
Most importantly, email has inherent limitations as an engagement tool. For instance, there is no way to collate the mail under a single URL that users can go to view the group’s communications. Another handicap is that a respondent needs to have the emails of everyone in the loop to reach them. If the ‘Bcc’ (blind-copy) function is used by a sender, it automatically denies other recipients the ability to respond to the entire group to contribute, counter, support or weigh in on the argument, discussion or ideas.
Email is not search engine discoverable. Only those in the loop have unfettered access to it.
All the above point to why companies need to look beyond email as an update tool when communicating with customers and investors while soliciting feedback. We have described these to point out the fundamental differences between social networks and other means of communication that have mass contact features such as email because many people responsible for external communications at companies, including investor relations, still cling to the email blast as their preferred means of communication.
In this video, Andy Lark, VP, Social Marketing at Dell, the computing solutions company, discusses how Dell is using social media to push their products, solicit feedback from clients, listen in on customer conversations and put across their various narratives such as strategy, product & service development, performance, issues management, etc.
At first reading, it would seem optimistic on our part to actually encourage and expect Nigerian companies to enter the social fray. After all, less than a quarter of the companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange have websites, and among those that do, only about 20% maintain their websites with relevant and timely content. So one would ask, if these companies struggle to have and implement a Web 1.0 strategy, how can they be expected to extend their involvement at the more demanding Web 2.o level? The answer is simple. These companies have ignored the web till now because they did not see the business implications. How could they? The website was pushed as a brand yard not a dynamic communication channel.
Of course, these companies never really questioned the cyber-cosmetic value of a website. It was nice to have a web site, but how did that translate to sales or investor support for management at shareholder meetings? The website or rather its launch was seen as an end in itself, not the beginning of a novel communications activity.
Since most of those pushing website development on these companies were designers and technologists, they were unable to show how the dots connect between the online and offline identities. No doubt, the design and technology are vital to the end result, but they are not the raison d’etre for it. Rather, they are incidental facilitators. It is no accident that the companies with the most up-to-date websites are banks, since they use the online channel to push their products, so the business case, from a strictly sales perspective was clear, even if it did not exist for other cases, for instance, explaining a bank’s retail strategy to investors.
We think that companies are losing a huge opportunity the more they delay their entry into the social space. This is not about dilettantism, but about winning customers, retaining clients, defending reputations, and putting across the value narrative of the company to investors.
One cannot help noticing how Niyi Meka Olowola, Oando's Head of Corp Comms, is nodding in approval. Maybe Goldman Sachs can learn lessons.04:47:49 PM January 25, 2012from HootSuite
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