social media & social networks

7 reasons why the business world hates social media

Are they any good reasons why you should hate social media? This is the unabridged version of my article published at CBS news. In a previous article about social media, we have described the 8 reasons why managers love social media and we have also debunked a few commonplace myths. In this new instalment, we’ll look at the flip side of corporate social media perception, the negative one, and we will also discuss the rationale behind each of these arguments.

7 reasons why the business world hates social media

7 reasons why the business world hates social media
7 reasons why the business world hates social media

 

  • #1.  All these online conversations could be dangerous, we’ll be losing control”: it’s true that social media is about employees, clients, partners and members of all kinds of ecosystems talking to one another. There is often that perception that these conversations might lead to the disparagement of the brand. Such discussions are often perceived negatively by managers as if they didn’t feel quite sure about how reliable or likeable their brand actually is. Hence they fail to assess and nurture brand loyalty through these discussions, although such discussions are often led by volunteers and aficionados. Also, in essence, this is what a brand is all about. A brand is what your clients “say about you when you’re not in the room” (probably by Jeff Bezos but the source is unclear and many versions of that quotation exist). And such discussions, good or bad, are bound to happen anyway, for social media (aka web 2.0) has made free expression available to all Internet users. Use social media to harness all these discussions rather than pretending you can prevent them. There are more opportunities than risks associated with it when you think about it. As Intel’s Ken Kaplan once declared at a 2008 Blogwell conference in San Jose: “social media is not something to fear but to embrace”,
  • #2. “Social media is a legal minefield”: a good proportion of the managers who are opposed to social media are afraid of the potential risks associated with freeform comments and trackbacks (backlinks to your site from external blogs/social media sites). The latter is indeed perceived as a means of injecting external content within a company’s website and managers are afraid of legal consequences. Yet, to put it in the words of my own lawyer: “a legal advisor’s role is not to frighten but to protect. Above all, we are business partners” (I like this guy!). And we did find a solution for our social media initiatives, from a legal point of view: all our blogs and community sites have been placed under a separate legal entity which led us to shift the responsibility from the main entity to another. Comments and TrackBack moderation is also a good idea which should not be overseen. The issue in this instance is about prevention, not irrational fears. And don’t forget that it’s a lot harder to address criticisms in traditional media. Comments can be moderated, unauthorised or – even better – give you an opportunity to respond,
  • #3. Online negative buzz monitoring is often on most social media opponents’ radar screen too: I am flabbergasted by the ability of certain buzz monitoring software vendors who spread fear about the blogosphere around them to sell their wares. Often, if not always, the so-called Kryptonite Blogstorm example will be quoted. The very title sounds like a legend and indeed it is. The problem is that this example is grossly exaggerated. Traditional media influence can still be a lot more damaging than online media if you don’t take care. I can’t imagine the New York Times being treated as if it were a social media website. Once again, there are more opportunities than risks in social media.
  • #4. Managers don’t want their employees to be headhunted because of corporate blogging: so I heard one day an Exec tell me that it was out of the question that one of his most prominent consultants could be seen on the Internet. I subsequently checked the blogger’s name on Google and immediately found him in LinkedIn as well as on his own personal blog. My reaction was then to encourage that blogger to blog for us. At least, now he is devoting his energy and time to promoting our company and its reputation. Besides, he knows that he is a valued employee of ours and that his work is acknowledged. One more reason to stay with us, and not leave!
  • #5.  “All that Internet stuff is not serious/businesslike, it’s just for techies”: with Internet usage penetration averaging 70% in the  UK (expressed in percentage of the total population, versus 48% in Europe, and the UK being outdone only by the nordics and the Netherlands), this is no longer true. Whereas in the 1990s, people believed that the Internet was made for train-spotters (see that picture taken from a 1996 AOL flyer), it is a sure bet nowadays that most web and social media users will be representative of the overall population. From a marketing point of view, each social media site has its target audiences. Social media is therefore a tool for doing business, as long as you are choosing the right platform for the right geography, population and/or business sector. For instance, Facebook is pervasive in the UK but not in France where only top users and IT experts are logged in. LinkedIn is big in the UK but in German-speaking countries, only Xing is used, don’t even bother to invite someone on LinkedIn there, it is virtually never used. In France, Viadeo is by far the leading social network, but most IT pundits will want to be seen in LinkedIn and will snub Viadeo users. So this is complex and more segmented than it seems, and I haven’t even talked about LinkedIn groups which make it possible for you to target micro populations. Social media definitely is a business tool and a place to start networking and building partnerships,
  • #6. “All that social networking stuff is a waste of (my) time”: Social networking is often getting media attention but what’s in it for business. Should business people allocate time to improve their networking skills on LinkedIn and the likes or should they consider spending more time doing proper business? The fact is that networking is the essence of business. It took me 4 years to build a serious network on LinkedIn. What I mean by serious is the careful – not random – selection of new connections through their profile. And I don’t just mean people I knew and wanted to reconnect with. My purpose was to expand that network in order to increase the number of opportunities for my business activities. And I can’t count the number of opportunities leveraged by such tools, whether it meant presenting my work at a conference, or liaising with my peers, partnering with new companies or even buying new stuff I didn’t know anything about before (incidentally, my counterparts must have been able to sell things too in that process). Of course, some of these encounters were irrelevant but I’d rather focus on the positive side of things by just looking at all these interesting opportunities I was able to seize. Each time a new tool appears, however, users are faced with the same problem and that is how to build (or re-build) a network of people first, before you can start reaping the benefits of such tools for business. The network of people is condition #1 for anything you do on social media platforms and it can be pretty much time-consuming mainly if you wish to target people one by one rather than inviting them all at random. As a conclusion, Social media is not a waste of time unless you let yourself be driven by the tool (time-consuming tools like Facebook or Twitter must be managed properly if you don’t want them to take up too much of your time). In essence, it’s not very different from what we went through at the beginning of the introduction of e-mail in the workplace. Managers started to oppose e-mail because they thought it could be a waste of time for them. But in essence, it was more of a status issue because their personal assistants used to filter all messages.
  • #7. “There is no ROI in Social media and corporate blogging in particular”: this final counter-argument I kept for the end of my list. As is often the case with innovations, sharp criticisms, as well as very apt critical analysis of blogging initiatives such as the corporate blog report by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff, are voiced. At that very time when people think they should give up (Gartner would call that moment the “trough of disillusionment”) i.e. when the hype dies away, there appear real opportunities to work on one’s ROI and reap the true benefits of the innovation in question (the “plateau of productivity” in Gartner speak). Social media is no exception to that rule. So why bother about Social media now? At times of “inflated expectations” (Gartner again), it’s hard to focus on ROI. Now that the crisis is making the ROI a must, here’s what we could add to that debate regarding social media in general and Corporate blogging in particular.
    • Firstly the cost of investing in social media is really negligible.
    • Secondly, the effort related to the production of the content within the framework of a blog initiative, for instance, is minimal too. In fact it does exist but it is diluted amongst the contributing experts. Social media is about user-generated content. This means that experts produce the effort as opposed to Internet managers spending vast amounts of our budget to get to the same – or even a slightly less impressive – result. And content does cost a lot of money. With user-generated content I save hundreds of thousands of euros every year; what’s that for ROI?  Saying it’s free would be wrong though, but the main cost of it all is change management. And producing content is very expensive.
    • Thirdly, now think about the benefits that we are getting from that effort: more motivated experts, better visibility for our brand, more efficient communications, a direct debate between experts, and facilitation of the entire ecosystem, brand awareness and image improvement. The list is endless.
    • At last, when I decided to ask my boss to write for the blog, I definitely solved the ROI issue because he suddenly understood that blogging enabled him to do things which were unthinkable before. What other initiative was available for him to write about his vision on Green IT to the whole world at a push of a button?

As a conclusion, social media offers so many new capabilities that it is worth making the effort to launch an initiative for your enterprise. Pitfalls exist – as with any kind of tool, be it IT or not – but there are ways to circumvent the problems so as to reap more benefits from this new way of communicating, more direct, more open, and geared towards direct open innovation with clients, partners and your ecosystem at large. If you manage to avoid misusing some of these tools and remained focussed on your business objectives, social media can then be a powerful ally to your marketing strategy. And don’t forget that rational answers to irrational fears exist too so that you can focus on looking at the half-full glass of social marketing.

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »

One Comment

  1. A very good overview of the counter-arguments to most Social Media criticisms! Points 5 and 6 really strike home for us.
    Continuing global internet penetration automatically implies a greater opportunity for company exposure. Obvious, right? Seems not, for a lot of companies. Targeted customer engagement through social media is essential. Like you said, most web and social media users are pretty much representative. If those same users don’t discover you through social media, there’s a good chance that not many users will discover you online anyway if they don’t know EXACTLY what to search for. E.g., niche markets – niche users will find you (eventually), but social media exposure may draw more users into your market, broadening your scope.
    And as for networking – it’s a simple fact that you really don’t know what doors will open and which business opportunities will come up when you connect with someone through something like LinkedIn. You might find that in a matter of months a really great opportunity pops up that simply could not have happened without those 15-minute-a-day LinkedIn sessions…
    Again, thanks for the great article!
    Nik – Big Click Studios
    @BigClickStudios

    1. Thanks for 2 nice comments on my post. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
      As to using social media for brand exposure, I will soon develop a story explaining what we did last week in London with a special kind of microblogging software called posterous at http://orangebusiness.posterous.com. We managed to increase the visibility not only on our event but on what we are doing in a big way, by using this short term posterous blog and a twitter account (and a few tricks up my sleeve let’s be honest).

  2. hi.. I was refered by a link to your blog. But I guess i landed up at a right place. All these days I was satisfied with my own logic of why people criticize Social Media in the first place. And what are reasons that people try to escape from this. I guess now your Blog is evidence to my thoughts and my logic behind it. I must say very good thought and ur initiative

  3. I agree with a lot of what you say and would like to add that like anything related to the digital arena there are always buzz words and band wagons we all feel we should join without any real analysis of the benefits they give to us as business owners.
    Social media optimisation is vastly overated but also under utilised. When SEO was in its infancy we saw the explosion of so called SEO firms spring up everywhere. It is the same with SMO. Without knowing the exact benefits of using social media optimisation in your business it would be best to leave alone until the potential benefits are realised.

    1. Sure. I don’t think it will be underutilised for very much longer though. 2010 will be THE year of Social Media.

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