Facebook, Twitter and the rest –who you think can spy the best?
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Hope I won’t get a virtual stoning after this column, because I am going to shatter the Holy Golden Calf of the social networks – their traditional usability. After the digital dust has settled, the marketing/sales wonders promised by the early social media gurus have been slow to materialize due to one concrete reality: nobody has come up yet with the alchemy formula that converts”likes”into money. The genius who will ‘decipher’ this ‘code’ is sure to become a billionaire overnight.
In the meantime, we live in one huge and loudBabel Tower of electronic spam – an endless unimaginable amount of totally useless information noise, overloading and irritating the users. And it is forever increasing. Many “funky” startups tried – and still try – to optimize the profiling in order to somehow bring the “likes” and $$$$ together. However, the more resourceful succeed, at best, to secure some temporary investment for their “revolutionary” applications.Results? That’s a different story altogether.
Given the omni- presence of this huge info noise in our lives, is it so totally useless? Well, depends on the objectives. And my point is that if organizations shift their business focus from exclusively marketing and sales,to other spheres of corporate activity, they might see a very tangible dollar value to their active digital presence.
Let’s remember the old cliché “information=money”, much money. Actually, it’s golden. And what a wonder, this highly expensive product is given voluntarily for free! On Internet. Just identify and scoop it and work into revenue. Not only in marketing, but also in:
- CRM – the first and easiest sphere of activity. (See Steve McKee at Bloomberg/Businessweekhttp://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-08/how-social-media-is-changing-crm#p2). A happy customer is a returning customer. Talk to them, engage them, endear them – real time, the moment their first status appears. Boost the online customer/technical and other support, and you will see a sequential change in the deal flow.
- BI – business intelligence. Funny how much invaluable info you can get from a Facebook’s, LinkedIn et al chat of a couple of engineers from a rival company. Facebook’s notorious fake profiles? Great, create one and start fishing industrial intel.From competitors (see this illuminating 2012 research by Unisphere Research for Information Today: http://www.gse.org/Portals/2/docs/GSE%20Docs/SocialMedia_BI_SurveyReport_Final.pdf).
You are not soliciting for clicks or begging for”likes”, just discussing some cool stuff, in the process of exchange of petpics. What can be more natural and unobtrusive than that?
Defense industries are not known for a particular liking of the social media. At best, do some sort of internal PR with the company’s latest do picson Facebook. However, putting some thought into it, a lot more deals could be closed if one undercuts the competitor, following the leads found in this pile of information trash.
Facebook as a diamond mine? Should I tell Zuck the Slayer?
By VICKI ZISMAN
The post Facebook, Twitter and the rest –who you think can spy the best? appeared on i-HLS.
http://i-hls.com/
2013-04-26 23:01:59
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