On Words and Business

Interesting premise to this blog post: we are all knowledge workers and companies who get this will win in the end.

The message here is that everyone is the face of the company, whether their job is in PR or corporate communications, or they are on the front lines. That anyone in a company can be communicating about the company and there isn’t as much oversight to outbound communications as there used to be. That’s a good thing in general. But these days it’s so easy for a message (good or bad) to spread, that it opens up a can of corporate worms.

It involves a lot of trust on the part of any company that empowers their employees via social media and let’s them join the conversation.  The companies that do this will win in the end. Does that make everyone a knowledge worker? I’m not sure.

Being social and networking are all about making the right connections. So is social media.

So how do you get people to notice you or your company? That’s a great question that many companies struggle with.

Like the six degrees of separation theory, having a social media presence means reaching the people who have lots of followers–the mass influencers–and tapping into their energy. Forrester talks about how to engage the mass influencers with the use of feedback. In this case, the story is about a site where reviews are posted and it makes sense. But does the idea work for different types of content?

Think about reaching out to anyone who comments on a blog post, separate from the blog; contacting them when you post something you think they will especially like or be able to respond to and asking for feedback. Contests to get people talking about your site.

What other ideas are out there for reaching mass influencers?

These days, social media and mobile apps get all the attention from the marketing set. Not to say that we oldsters aren’t joining the party, but when it comes to making it look easy, both of these are pretty much the purview of the younger set, the Millennials.

But guess what…according to Nielsen (in this report on Marketing Chart) Boomers’ use of Twitter jumped 469% in 2009 (there was nowhere to go but up!). 80% of Gen-Xers use tools like Facebook and Twitter. The Greatest Generation, those over 65, are a different story when it comes to the social media and mobile bandwagon. They are a bunch who like email, though, so you can still reach ‘em online.

Go forth and market…

The small business success index takes on social media:

• 75% have a company page on a social media site like LinkedIn or Facebook.
  I have a company page on LinkedIn and am wishing there was more I could do with it. In my world, Facebook is for personal use and I don’t see that my customers would be looking for me there. Are you?
• 39% have a blog
  Check. This is it.
• 26% tweet
  Nope.
• 61% use social media to identify new customers
  Working on this one.

How are you using social media technologies in your business?

According to a recent survey , more than half the journalists surveyed said that social media sources are important or somewhat important, and 89% said they used blogs in their research.

If you want to get noticed, it seems like socializing in cyberspace is increasingly the way to do it.

Read more about the story on MediaPost.

The Economist published this special report on social networking, including a discussion of why the networks grow so fast, how small businesses are using them to their advantage, how it’s changing the world of job hunting, and what we can expect in terms of privacy issues.

As of October, 2009 Facebook was the clear winner in the numbers game with over 430 million users. Wow.