Is social media proven?

I read a great tweet today from the excellent blogger and social media supremo Andrew Grill (see http://www.andrewgrill.com/blog/ ) where he retold a discussion with someone from a traditional polling company who told him “social media not really proved in UK yet”. Earlier in the week Pirate Talking wrote here http://lesanto.com/wordpress/?p=25 about how you don’t have to ‘get’ social media, but how you really can’t just ignore it. Every day there’s dozens of examples of creative, innovative uses of social media by everyone from small groups of people to the largest corportations. Now granted I work in the social media industry (are we an industry now?!) and so I live this stuff all the time, but I really struggle to comprehend how anyone working in any business now whose role even marginally gets near social media could doubt its impact.

Look at the numbers. Just in our own little country, we have over 22 million Facebook users (source http://www.checkfacebook.com/). With a population of over 61 million (source http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=6), that’s a staggering 36% of the population using Facebook. How about Twitter – over 5.5 million of us in the UK tweet (source http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/29677/uk-twitter-users-profiled-yougov). And that’s before you go anywhere near the millions who use forums to get information, use email groups, or who are using social media without even realising they’re doing so. Trawl through Amazon book reviews (written by people just like us, not journalists), and you’re taking direct influence from social media. Decide which new TV you’re going to buy by checking out the reviews online, that’s direct social media influence. Indeed doing something so passive as watching Sky News or reading a newspaper and, whether you like it or not, the relative importance of some of the stories will be totally directed by their social media prominence.

Yet, it only takes 2 minutes to very easily find some major household names in the UK who seem to still believe that social media isn’t something they need to be too concerned about. For them it indeed seems that social media is not proven. Maybe they think it’s something that only small, cool firms need to worry about? Hardly – there’s enough examples of the biggest and most traditional companies totally embracing the opportunities that being involved in social media brings. Or maybe social media is just for chatting to your mates? Well indeed it is well used for that, but by ignoring the presence of millions of people (their customers!!) doing just that, they are totally missing the opportunity. And of course where they fail to get out of bed in time, there’ll be plenty of others who’re already way, way ahead and stealing their market. If these companies don’t wake up soon then they’re essentially starting to write their own obituaries.

Social media is the biggest opportunity for companies (whatever their size) to connect directly with customers that there’s been since people all had personal relationships with their local butcher, greengrocer and baker. Business today is distributed, and is for a lot of companies faceless, without personal relationships, but social media allows direct feedback, direct customer-to-business relationships, and the opportunity to turn detractors to advocates (and to see those advocates publically tell their friends just how positive they are). Social media can influence practically anything. The power of the crowd is simply staggering, and with a general election a matter of weeks away we’ll soon see how socially switched on each of the political parties are. But coming back to the polling company, if they truly believe that cold calling or standing in a street with a clipboard is a better way of reaching a potentially incredible percentage of the population, then good luck to them…

If you liked this article, please pass it on (buttons below):