Good Morning social media fans! Its my second week at Breath-e and I am thoroughly enjoying it, although the train journey on the met line into Farringdon is becoming tediously slow – Its time for me to move away from my country retreat into the city.. but that’s a different story all together. This morning I stumbled across an interesting article over on SocialMedia.biz by Ayelet Noff.

I have experienced first hand from working in PR, companies & brands fearing social media for various different reasons, but here are the top five con­cerns that Ayalet has heard from exec­u­tives and her responses to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose con­trol of their brand and open them­selves up to neg­a­tive feed­back

When you open a busi­ness and start mar­ket­ing your ser­vices and expos­ing your brand to oth­ers, peo­ple will start talk­ing about your brand. And this is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.

Peo­ple are going to be talk­ing about your brand no mat­ter what. The ques­tion is: Do you want to be a part of the dia­logue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what peo­ple are say­ing? If a per­son is dis­sat­is­fied with your ser­vices, do you pre­fer he opens up this dis­cus­sion in a “I hate <your brand>” group opened up by another hater or do you pre­fer that he come to your page and post the com­plaint there allow­ing you to respond appro­pri­ately and even per­haps win him back as a client?

Social media didn’t cre­ate the dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer — it only allowed him a plat­form to express his frus­tra­tion. If you don’t give him the stage to speak, he will do it else­where and believe me, it will cause a great deal more dam­age to your brand if you’re not there to respond and open to criticism.

When we speak of social media, we speak of con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing — lis­ten­ing before sell­ing, open­ing a dia­logue with the user and not just throw­ing a blink­ing ban­ner in his face. Brands need to make that switch in their heads and under­stand that social media is SOCIAL. Many con­ver­sa­tions will be pos­i­tive and you will have these nice mes­sages recorded for every­one to see pub­licly — your bosses, your investors, your cus­tomers and poten­tial customers:

Some con­ver­sa­tions may be neg­a­tive but these con­ver­sa­tions should be seen as wel­comed oppor­tu­ni­ties to gain back cus­tomers. If you uti­lize social media effec­tively and are alert to what peo­ple are say­ing about you online, then you can also respond in a timely and intel­li­gent man­ner. When you’re dazed and con­fused and too afraid to see what peo­ple may be say­ing about you, that’s when the con­ver­sa­tion can get out of con­trol and your brand­ing and posi­tion­ing can go out the win­dow. Com­pa­nies who under­stand social media know that by using social media they are increas­ing the num­ber of pos­i­tive responses to their brand and mak­ing sure to con­trol and decrease the neg­a­tive responses by show­ing peo­ple that they actu­ally care about what they have to say.

2) They don’t under­stand it

Com­pa­nies fear social media because they don’t under­stand what to do with it, what to talk about, who to turn to. They often time try to do it in-house with­out the appro­pri­ate guid­ance, fail mis­er­ably and then say that social media doesn’t work. Don’t hire your friend’s son who is very active on Face­book to do your mar­ket­ing strat­egy for you. Just like you wouldn’t fix your car in-house or do your PR in-house, nei­ther should you start doing social media on your own with­out hav­ing a social media guru at your side. And when I say guru, I mean some­one who has had a good track record in cre­at­ing suc­cess­ful social media cam­paigns for other com­pa­nies in the past. Once you have such a guide at your side and you begin to under­stand what social media is all about, then you will not be afraid of it any­more and you will start to rec­og­nize the infi­nite num­ber of amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that social media will open your brand to.

3) The effec­tive­ness of social media is hard to mea­sure

Because social media is still in its dia­pers, it took a lit­tle while for tools track­ing the ROI on social media cam­paigns to emerge, how­ever today we have a suite of dif­fer­ent tools that allow com­pa­nies to track even the most minute details in the effec­tive­ness of their social media cam­paigns. Tools like Google Ana­lyt­ics, which allow us to track the traf­fic com­ing into our site as well as where it’s com­ing from has existed for years. Google alerts which allow us to see the blog posts and other sites link­ing back to our site have also existed for a long time. And we are now see­ing an influx of ser­vices that not only allow you to eas­ily mon­i­tor what peo­ple are say­ing about your brand but also see who are the top influ­encers, opin­ion lead­ers in your indus­try and more. There are numer­ous ser­vices that allow you to see the top influ­encers on twit­ter such as: Twit­ter grader and twit­ter ana­lyt­ics ser­vices such as Twit­alyzer . Face­book also pro­vides its own insights to page admins and enables admins to view infor­ma­tion regard­ing the demo­graph­ics of their fans and also how many inter­ac­tions, com­ments, wall posts, etc. were found on the page. The more we learn about social media, the more tools we get to mea­sure it. Not only are our efforts in the social media realm mea­sur­able but social media cam­paigns also allow us to tar­get spe­cific cam­paigns to spe­cific niches like no other media today.

4) They’re afraid that employ­ees will be on Face­book and twit­ter chat­ting all day — Face­book today has around 350 mil­lion users. If Face­book was a nation, it would be the world’s third most pop­u­lous after China and India. Your employ­ees are there any­way. Why not uti­lize the fact that they are there to help your cause? When you need to spread the word on Face­book, why not enable your employ­ees to help you or when you finally open that fan page on Face­book, why not allow your employ­ees to become fans and encour­age them to take part in your social media activ­i­ties. Dell for exam­ple, who is well known for their great twit­ter strat­egy (a strat­egy which has earned them $6.5 mil­lion to date), has around 200 employ­ees work­ing its twit­ter account, respond­ing to people.

In addi­tion, not allow­ing your employ­ees to have access to the vast amount of infor­ma­tion that can be found on social net­works as well as not enabling them to use these net­works as research tools nor to net­work with peo­ple in the indus­try also puts your com­pany at a great dis­ad­van­tage to your com­peti­tors who do allow their employ­ees (and even encour­age them) to use social media tools.

5) Social media is costly — This last fear is not only some­thing that com­pa­nies should not fear but it is also not true. If you con­sider the mil­lions of peo­ple that you can reach using social media as opposed to the cost of buy­ing an ad on TV or buy­ing a ban­ner, you’ll see that social media is one of the most cost effi­cient ways of reach­ing your tar­get audi­ence today.

To any­one who still thinks social media is a fad, wake up. It’s not. Social media is here and it’s here to stay. If you took a look at the lat­est report that came out of Davos regard­ing social net­works, you’ll see that Face­book is now the sec­ond most pop­u­lar site on the inter­net after Google and that accord­ing to Nielsen since Feb­ru­ary 2009 peo­ple have been spend­ing more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is get­ting big­ger. The ques­tion for your brand is no longer whether to be there or not to be there. The ques­tion is when will you be there and the longer you keep your head in the ground, the more you’ll lose touch with what’s hap­pen­ing out there in the real world.

Great Ostrich pic credit: http://blog.karmona.com