It’s All Social
Guest Blog Post for Atomic Design and Consulting by Kay Byfield
People Are Social
Humans started working together eons ago in order to meet the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. This led to teams, clans, tribes, cities, and states. Over time, necessities, and many of our relationships, began to be provided through commerce. All of these associations are social.
To be successful, businesses must provide a necessary product or service and find ways to make it available to the consumers who want it. That requires design, production, sales and marketing, distribution, and customer service.
These functions all involve people of course. Employees, investors, customers, competitors, regulators, suppliers, and communities all have relationships with the business and the other stakeholders. In the broadest sense, whenever there is an interaction among them, it is social.
Using Social Media
YouTube, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, FourSquare, Tumblr and all the other social platforms will help you increase the frequency and reach of your social engagement with contacts. As you formulate your social media strategy, you need to specify which channels have the highest probability of making a positive impact on the bottom line and the steps necessary to actuate them. Who will be responsible for them, what will the objectives be, and how and when will those steps be activated and maintained? How will each of those social media activities fit into the larger marketing program? How will the outcomes be evaluated?Social media broadens the ways people can interact in order to enhance their relationships but these newer technologies are not intended to replace the older ways we connected (face-to-face, mail, email, telephone, etc.). We need to remember that while it is easy to be consumed by the breadth of our engagement with social media, it is equally important to create and maintain relationships that have some depth.
Going Beyond Social Media
This means that, in addition to developing dynamic contact lists and having an active publishing calendar using the platforms most likely to reach your intended audience, you need to establish opportunities for personal interactions. Phone calls and face-to-face meetings are critical to nurturing relationships with your key stakeholders.
Just as you call friends and plan get-togethers, make contact with important business connections in a personal way that doesn’t involve group distribution. Pick up the phone, send personal emails, post private texts with content that demonstrates empathy and a WIIFT (What’s In It For Them) approach. Pair your social media outreach efforts with additional one-to-one interactions.
Loyalty and commitment depend upon meaningful, deep connections that cannot be forged with mass communicationslike social media alone. Used well, social platforms provide easy ways to publish information that will be valued by the audience and will increase your visibility and credibility. To cement those relationships, however, in most cases it is critical that you find more personal opportunities for engagement.
It’s all social. Business relies on relationships that are long and strong.
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