Why Social Media Matters

Social media still faces some adversaries, and many will still ask “why social media matters.” So let's say I'm trying to convince a company that a 10% investment of their budget in social media is a prudent one. What reasons could win over any skeptics, and defend my position?

1. Social media creates relationships and brand evangelists.

By being able to reach consumers exactly when then need you, that excellent service can create brand evangelists that will promote your brand organically. Instead of broadcasting a message, consumers ca interact and create conversations. “Social media is the interactive, ongoing conversation you (or your brand) is having with your customers.” - Jason VanLue, FiveSeven Studios

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Carnival Case

2. Immediate crisis management at the source. Social media allows companies to become aware of crisis situations quickly. It is possible to respond directly to the source of the problem and deal with it before it escalates. Without a social media presence you cannot respond to social media threats and crises.

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Digital Crisis Management

Five Steps for Recovering from an Online Reputation Crisis

3. Development through crowd-sourcing. Social media networks are comprised of a variety of different people with many different talents. By crowd-sourcing creative tasks, you can cut costs and increase the variety of ideas. Crowd-sourced development can be administered through contests, where the prize is much cheaper than the cost of in-house development.

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Example: Victors and Spoils

Where Customers Submit, Discuss, and Vote, Ideas : "My Starbucks Ideas"

Slide Show: Developing a Corporate Listening Grid

Developing a Corporate Listening Grid

View more presentations from Marc Meyer.

4. Create Sales Social media reaches consumers directly at their point of need. It can create awareness of your product and customer service. Happy customers can serve as positive referrals for your product or service, and add 3^rd party credibility.

More: Best Fits for Social Media in the Sales Cycle

5. Research from the target, unfiltered. Social media provides listening posts for companies to listen to what consumers are saying about their brand. Influencers can be pointed out by the amount of friends, followers, or subscribers that are listening to them to discover who can be utilized to effectively reach the target.

More: 50 Ways to Use Social Media

And there are many more resources to continue learning and developing social media practices:

ChrisBrogan.com
EdwardBoches.com
Mashable.com

Four Months of Social Media: So What?

My semester at Emerson is coming to a close. With only one more semester before graduation, it has suddenly hit me with the realization that I really must ration my time well. After this semester enrolled in a social media, I feel that I have spent my valuable time left in school well. By creating a blog I was able to merge my passions of video games and marketing. I tried to deliver relevant information for developers who may have no budget for marketing, but the time they have to spend. With no budget, left with just our ideas and social media skills, throughout the semester we developed social media plans for real clients who assigned us real tasks, like DoInk, 8Minute Dating, Nokia, and Cisco for Flip Video. Through my experiences, such as optimizing my LinkedIn account, I was able to develop my knowledge of social media and how to utilize it best. Be it through Twitter, Facebook, blogging, or any other means, I gained valuable experience in creating traffic and excitement on social media. Taking the experience from these assignments, I tried to relate the power of social media to the video games industry with blog highlights such as:

Spreading the Infection of Left 4 Dead 2 via Social Media
These social media options certainly would not require a 25 million dollar budget, and inject a little more excitement into the game's launch than just a sea of billboards.

6 Facebook Tips for Indie Video Game Developers
More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day, and some of them will want your product. That's more than twice the population of Norway.

Harnessing the Internet
Underneath the appearance of organization the websites and networks we build, the internet is in a state on anarchy.



Now at the end of the semester, I've tried to answer “why social media matters” in 140 characters or fewer:
Beyond those 140 characters, social media matters, especially to indie video game developers, because the only investment you absolutely need is time. With that time developers can use social media to develop relationships with their fans. They can easily track what's being said about them, and personally react to any situation or opportunity. Social media can get indie developers noticed, whether that be through @replying a key industry figure on Twitter, or linking other websites and blogs through their development blogs. It can give the little guy a big voice. Ideally, through all of these experiences and assignments, I would like to be able to give an indie developer, or brand I love in video games, a voice with what I have learned. With my passion for the industry and the knowledge and experience I have gained, I feel I could now truly make an impact on the social media presence of an IP or developer.

Brogan and Boches: Head to head and side by side

These two men, Chris Brogan and Edward Boches, are what many consider to be the faces of social media. That is, of course, if social media has a face, and a blog, and could ever be represented by any two people. Thought-leaders in the social space, Brogan and Boches offer their insights, day after day through their competing blogs. Competing for their readers' time, maybe, but these two blogs are written, and present their thoughts in very different manners. Both offer insightful opinions on social media and marketing as a whole, but you would never be wasting your time to read both. The experience for each is entirely different. They teach lessons the Facebook page for my social media class, “Why Social Media Matters,” can learn from to better our experience.

Brogan's blog entries seem to serve as general educational topics. Entries usually aren't laden with examples to back himself up. He is offering his very professional and respected opinion to help his readers understand and utilize social media. He's treating the blog as part social media, as it is, and not just a bulletin board, by constantly asking for feedback from his readers. The blog's goal is to “educate people on the use of social business communication” according to Brogan, whom I asked through his Twitter handle, @chrisbrogan. While there aren't always sources, his position and extensive knowledge seats him in a chair of credibility. Outside of the entry itself, comments are extremely important, and interaction is rampant between the readers. He gives the opportunity to, in a very succinct reading experience, digest his thoughts, and offer your own back to the community, whether you agree or not.

Boche's blog is a whole other beast. When I say beast, I mean that there is a lot of meat in an Edward Boches entry. Utilized in almost every entry are examples backing his arguments and opinion, as well as sources that offer what he is presenting another layer of credibility. When I look at Boches blog, I see what you would email that stubborn CMO that doesn't believe in social media. Fattened up by examples, numbers, and credible sources, Boches writes brief, essay-like entries. His “type A” personality shines through, with as many hyperlinked keywords and sources as he can, before the screen turns completely red (from hyperlinks, nothing sinister). While a bit heavier than Brogan's entries, his ideas and opinions are concrete.

As I said before, Boches' blog you could send to a non-believer of social media to show what is being done, and also get examples from a strong source concerning trends for yourself. Brogan is there to help you help yourself to help the community; education is the key. If one had to be doing a better job than another, and it's tough for me to say as they operate with separate styles and goals, Boches entries and constant responses to his readers do a great job of interacting with his community while supplying them with the means to act as a social media practitioner and advocate. For anyone operating in social media, or considering it, both are goldmines of insight and advice.

Exploring the Visuals of Social Media

There is one de-facto king of internet video. Youtube. You would have been shocked to see any other answer. That's how solidified Youtube's position is when it comes to a video based social network. But that doesn't mean Youtube is the best place for all videos. Perhaps the community is so large that the people you want to view your videos aren't getting to it. That is where Youtube's competitors step in.

One such competitor is Vimeo.com. Vimeo's community is much smaller, and tries to cater to a more artistic crowd. Their two most important qualities are listed on the landing page for every visitor to see.


Vimeo's appeal is to more serious video makers. Those who aren't producing reply videos on their webcams about the most recent celebrity gossip. Well, mostly. Navigating the site is a lot easier as well. The explore tag allows you to search through videos by category, groups, channels, high definition, staff picks, projects, widgets, and toys (interactive visualizations of what's happening on Vimeo). The site puts an enormous emphasis on keeping things respectful between users, unlike the black lagoon that are Youtube comments.

When you've finally found a video that interests you, Vimeo supplies a myriad of options to share it on social media. Videos can be shared through Flickr, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, and Twitter. Email is a possibility as well, but if you want to get the word out about the video you just saw, the social media options are wide enough to do it.

Who's creating social media sales?

Newegg.com has a been able to utilize both Facebook and Twitter to create sales through social media. Both are used to announce sales available to all and deals that are exclusively announced to their fans and followers. By not only announcing sales to their followers, but providing announcements only to their fans and followers they are giving their social media consumers benefits and a reason to engage with them.

A Communications College's Social Communication Report Card

Being a student attending Emerson College, a communications and liberal arts school, it's interesting to take a look at how the school itself is communicating, especially in the realm of social media. By examining the school, we can learn from what they have been up to, or what they haven't done in their social media space.

While it seems that Emerson's students have adopted social media readily, the college appears lagging behind. The Emerson College Twitter (@emersoncollege) has not been utilized at all. It is encouraging that Emerson created a Twitter account, and personalized it with a bio and wallpaper, which are elements that should be considered when making a Twitter account. It shows that they did put some consideration into it. They even have somehow amassed 500 followers. However, these considerations a made useless by the quite obvious fact that Emerson has not updated their Twitter once. Not a single tweet is on their homepage. It may be that they never took is seriously enough to make a plan for how it would be used, or never appointed someone to maintain it. There are enough uses for it, such as emergency announcements, or updates concerning events, changes in the school schedule, or even flu related updates, yet @emersoncollege lays dormant.


So after a look at Emerson's lackluster effort on the Twitter front, let's take a look at what they've been up to with Facebook page. The first thing you'll notice is that the Facebook page, unlike the Twitter page, is actually getting some use. News updates appear several times a day, and those stories are being commented on. It's great that they're supplying content to their wall. However, not all is right. Many of the comments have questions pertaining to the news, and none of them are being answered. There is no interaction. While the page is getting use, it's being treated like an RSS feed for events and news, not a source of interaction with the college. Interaction would greatly improve their page, and would give the college a voice. The Facebook page would be a great place for Emerson to show its very different personality, through hosting videos of student projects and productions. It isn't limited to the Wall.

Emerson's Iwasaki Library Blog has the right idea. The blog is updated with an assortment of topics, ranging from responses to suggestions, reference picks of the week, as well as updates concerning to the library. There is no media used though, so it has a very boring appearance. It could be spiced up with a few pictures.

Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Beta

Any independent video game developer who has ever released a public beta has taken part in some sort of crowdsourcing. When a beta is released, the point is not simply to give the community a taste of the game before it's released. You're seeking the input of the beta testers. An employee could just test the game, looking for bugs, of you could get the community involved. That is crowdsourcing.


crowdsourcing: The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a group of people or community in the form of an open call.

Because beta-testing is such a common practice, I'd like to bring to light a great example of an indie developer crowdsourcing. World of Goo developer 2D Boy used crowdsourcing to reach out to their community for the Linux version of World of Goo. With admitted inexperience at releasing a game on Linux, 2DBoy used their blog to ask the community for help.

They wanted to know how Linux users would like the game distributed, and what has worked in the past. Linux users were given the power to decide how they would be able to purchase the game. The community was able to feel involved in the process, and that their opinions were values, while the developer was able to overcoming their unfamiliarity with releasing a game on Linux.


Of course, crowdsourcing can be used in an even more integrated way. TheGameCartel.com is an interesting project that is using crowdsourcing as the means to the content of the game.

Based on the input of the community through their website or their Facebook page, the developers will create the games content. It is a completely community created game with the developers just constructing the crowdsourced content. It will be interesting how this project works out.

As you can see, crowdsourcing can not only be a great way to get your community involved with development, it can be a vast resource of information.