More on the Social Networking for Business debate

It struck me the other day as I was watching a new emerging trend happen right before my eyes.

If you're normally spending more than 10k/week, you're excluded from this conversation - but for the smaller organization that has a limited marketing expense budget it becomes rather critical.  

The "twitternation" is contributing to higher costs in business. Its free, how can this be? Simple math. 1 employee using up to 30 minutes a day to read/post tweets by 240 days is 120 hours LOST PRODUCTION a year! 120 hours is pretty much 3 full weeks.

Oh wait, ah you ARE the marketing director/new business development coordinator/your title here. Lets lok at another angle shall we?

Lets say you're making oh say $8.00/hour and then this cost is around 960 bucks for a year! Most companies would want to know how to CUT costs by that much per employee (some will spend twice that to learn how). So - what does $1000 buy in marketing today? How many new customers would one expect from that outlay?

Search engines will also end up frsutrating users as well. Say they see a link to one of your "tweets" only to discover its so old its not even in your recent logs - so seeing everything thats NOT relevant to what they were looking for - they move on instead of spending time searching through your tweets. Oh some DO take the time to actually hunt for a certain one - hence the conservative 30 minutes mentioned above LOL. Additionally, its deemed by the searchee that search for 140 characters of topic matter is MORE important than actually checking a routinely updated web site. (This is not the time for a dissertation on deeming what is appropriate use of the web when one is on the clock)

Ask yourself when you post: "Is this the same information that goes in the newsletter, online news, email blasts, and the like?" Is it duplication of effort OR is it actually having a positive result?

By decentralizing your media stream you begin to expend a higher number of resources to maintain each and every outlet of information.

 I am still on the fence on this trend BUT if its working for you, thats great - but step back and take a look at the true cost versus return (new customer/member/etc).

 

Categories: Social Networking

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25. March 2009 18:09 by Administrator2 | Comments (0) | Permalink

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About the author

I've been involved in Internet technology since the early 90's. I started by running a BBS, then FIDOnet (precursor to todays e-mail). This in turn lead me to start one of the world's first HTML based BBS with Internet technology. Prior to moving back to hometown WV in 2004, I was a developer for numerous companies, including Fortune 500 firms, dot com 'darling' companies, and AOL's public web site (non-member side) inlcuding having completed many sites for the Federal government including the EPA, FCC, NIH, and the USDA. I've worked on massive challenging sites, with a teams of developers, programmers, all for one single site and I've worked in companies where I took manula web site production from several weeks to just hours creating 2-5 new sites a week using automated tools , many with e-commerce capabilities.

Its been an exciting career for the past 15+ yrs or so. Sure, I've stepped on toes, I've hit the perverbial glass ceiling too (in a previous job),  I've seen trends come and go (heck I may have even started a few). I've made some people a lot of money, and I've seen people put their entire life into a web site. I was there at  the beginning - where were you?

I've learned to tell what works for companies and what doesn't. The internet is not one size fits all, as social networking is not for every company. Technology is not the challenge. Almost all the internet technology suitable for everyday business is off-the-shelf, the true challenge is change. Change involves education, implementation, and adaptation.