Comments on: Twitter and Social Media: Pointless babble or pot of gold?

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:12:30 +0000

Twitter can be a real time suck for any company if there is not a plan in place.

By: patrick murphy

patrick murphy — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:24:48 +0000

To clarify my statement and in response to Luke’s question. Luke’s point above is very valid. Social Media for use does generate leads but it is our business and the value that we add that converts those leads into revenue. Every business has to generate new business and for us social media is very good at introducing us and our services to potential clients. But we do not measure the ROI on social media as it is something that we would do regardless. I have the view that if you enter into social media as a pure lead generation tool then you are starting out on the wrong foot. According to a recent survey by eConsultancy the majority of companies are using social media for brand awareness and introducing new content, so maybe we are not alone. Hope this makes sense.

By: Anne

Anne — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:34:17 +0000

I have yet to be brave enough to Twitter. I’m surprised that only 40% was found to be useless babble. Much of what I have seen shows the inability to use the English language without using valuable characters on swear words! No, I’m not really a snob, I just don’t see how I could cultivate an audience when I seem to speak a different language!

By: Luke Owen

Luke Owen — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:41:15 +0000

I like how you presented some real life examples here. However, I’m a little confused by Patrick Murphy from SiliconCloud’s response. If they use it to generate leads, and those leads turn into sales, how are they not using social media to generate revenue? Are they saying that they have yet to convert any of these leads over to clients? Maybe I just need to know more about their service but it would seem logical to me that if you can develop new dialogs with a potential customer through social media, and that person eventually becomes a customer who buys your services, it would appear that social media helped generate revenue for you.

By: Daniel Burstein

Daniel Burstein — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:29:38 +0000

You make a good point, Jeff. And in a recent web clinic, we specifically taught that you should develop a social media methodology and strategy before diving into any social media platform. As part of that social media methodology, you must have a firm understanding of how social media is currently impacting your business and industry, what your objectives are, and how they map to social media actions. Only then can you decide which devices to use. I say "when" and not "if" because it is the extremely rare modern marketer that will not see some incremental benefit to using social media. In fact, if you can think of a type of marketer that should not be using social media at all, please let me know. Which brings us to my "a huge challenge to the modern marketer" comment. As you can see, I was using Twitter as an example for the challenge facing marketers in all social media. With so much "noise" (not to mention, so much doubt around ROI), how should the modern marketer approach social media? Especially considering that, as with anything else, you constantly have to stay ahead/keep up with/not fall too far behind the competition, simply doing nothing until social media shakes out and matures is not an option. I believe we have some good answers to the above question in our social media marketing web clinic. Which, I agree Jeff, includes answering the simple question of "Why?" However, I would hesitate to advise any marketer to "slow down" while asking that question.

By: 10 Social Media Goals for Author Promotion

10 Social Media Goals for Author Promotion — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:12:11 +0000

[...] and where should authors use social media? I recently read a blog post about how businesses are using social media. Here, I go through these 10 purposes and muse about how authors might use social media for the [...]