Imagine it is New Years Eve 2011, just two short years from now and you are having a conversation with a buddy from work and you are remembering the days when your firm only had 4 people actively engaged in social media.
Its now 2011 and everyone in your company has access to and the ability to jump and engage in social media.
I liken this to the early days of email, when only a few people in the company had access to email. “Not everyone needs it” I remember hearing! But now that statement seems so “out of touch” it’s comical!
24 months from now will your company seem comical? Will you have rolled out, recruited and trained everyone on how to use and engage with social media?
Will your contact center be able to handle the flow of inquires coming in from not just the phone and email, but from Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, comments, and other social networks yet to be invented?
If you are one of the lucky 4 right now … your job is not only to listen, share and engage on social media … its also to educate the folks around you in your organization and get them up to speed on what you are doing and how they can get engaged as well.
Social media won’t burn out and go away; there are too many effective uses and adoptions of social media into the hands of your customers to stop. So it’s not a question of if you need to roll out social media even wider … it’s a question of when are you going to roll it out wider!
So, when will you?
Tags: Social Media
It’s amazing how technology is progressing these days, including how social media can evolve almost overnight.
In my own perspective, as long as technology offers something new, social media will also advance in terms of accessibility and availability.
Well, the most common communication tools we use nowadays were only “futuristic” imaginings in sci-fi novels thirty to forty years ago.
We will never know what social media will offer next but one thing should be sure: be prepared to adapt or else get left behind.
what ur telling is right but risk is there
Well done! By the way I like your “storytelling” approach to making your point!
Wouldn’t it make more sense if we would seek to understand the opportunities these innovative technologies provide, such as with social media, and then try to determine how we can leverage them to improve our current position? I get it, and see it daily in my industry. It’s quite common even for high tech firms to be somewhat cautious towards innovative technologies. A related example is of all the Web 1.0 sites that exist today, while Web 2.0 clearly drives a stronger ROI.
Now, as with years too come, the clear winners of industry will be those who innovate, even if that means simply leveraging innovative technology. Social Media is an easy one– embrace it and grow, or as Tom Peters likes to say “Innovate or Die”.
It depends on the type of company and even the role within the company. I think that those of us in the always-on high-tech world consider it bizarre that someone doesn’t have email.
In 2011, should a nurse at a hospital or the person installing airbags into new vehicles be communicating regularly over social media? How much time should the nurse take away from caring for patients or the airbag installer take away from installing an essential safety feature to spend twittering? What should a janitor’s strategy be for social media engagement?
Is the decrease in productivity due to social networking more than offset by the increase in sales and brand awareness? Would you advise McDonald’s shareholders to pressure the management team into training all of their employees to engage in social media periodically on the job?