Thursday 16 February 2012

You're doomed if you don't use social media

This week’s class discussion has been an eye opener for me. In our assigned groups, we had to discuss real world examples of how organizations have been using social media. Some examples provided were RIM’s announcement of their new CEO, Tassimo Canada Recall, Obama Barack’s 2012 Campaign and Costa Concordia Carnival just to name a few. There has been lots of great discussion from the classe from how companies are using (and not using) a number of social media outlets to connect and engage with their customers to build their brand.

Mashable published this article on how PR professionals are using social media to show results. The article goes on to say, “PR professionals use social media every single day to get the word out about clients, to communicate with customers and to respond to questions or problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites have quickly become important tools in a PR professional’s overall toolkit.”

PR professionals need to understand the medium and use it to advance their message to their publics and expand their reach. I think companies that do not have a social media program or lacking in one, are "behind the eight ball" and really need to on top of it because their competitors might be better influencing and taking away your customers.

I'm curious, are there any companies out there that aren't using social media and are they still surviving?
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2 comments:

  1. SM19 February 2012 at 12:06

    I completely agree. Organizations and/or companies who don't communicate with their publics or extend their reach miss out on potential new customers, increased sales, and a lack of building a stronger brand. It is important for companies to adapt to social media because it is not fade and social media is not going away any time soon.

    I work in the transportation industry and as the community manager of their social media accounts, I have noticed that not many transportation companies have social media, which is a shame considering their job is to transport freight across North America. Social media is a great way to reach out to people, build relationships, and let people know you're in business from 1000s of miles away. Transportation is an industry lacking social media.

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  2. Anonymous21 February 2012 at 16:04

    Sadly, my organization is not on social media yet. We're owned by a larger financial institution and our parent company isn't on board with social media yet either. I am doing research on social media in hopes of implementing it this year for the company. The challenge is that we do not deal with the public directly. We are an insurance company who partner up with insurance brokerages and the clients we have are our broker's clients. A lot of the brokerages are not up to speed with technology, let alone social media. Some are still in rural areas with no high speed internet.

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