Cause and Affect

Why Should Businesses Pay Attention to Social Media?

I was at a workshop today held by Women Unlimited. It was for beginners at social media, and I wanted to see what business people tend to know. Then I can know better how to help them.

A seasoned marketing professional piped up that she’d never get on Twitter. She doesn’t care what her friends’ cats are up to. She deals with corporates and believes they probably won’t either.

Forget the Cats: Why This Is Important

I can’t argue with that last bit. But what I can argue is that companies do indeed need to know what’s happening in the social networks.

You only need to look at the Tweets on the Iranian protests to see that people talk about a lot more than trivial details. And if someone bothers to cram a comment about your brand into a Tweet, there are strong feelings behind it.

Strong feelings are the things you want to know most about.

Back to Basics: Where Do Convictions Come From?

Most intellectual decisions come both from a combination of analysis and feeling. Inspiration is a meeting point of intellectual and emotional insight, and when “moved” to act, it’s not just your intellect doing the pushing.

It’s not just the fact of a comment that reveals the importance of what is said in social networks. It’s also the language and context. People write conversationally, and the meaning is often more transparent than in a more formal review. In terms of context, they might feel outraged (or delighted) and want to broadcast warnings (or praise) about your company because of the feeling their experience generated about your product or brand.

In a social context, an individual’s credibility is built on the reliability of his or her comments.

And to get back where we started, wouldn’t your marketing department benefit from knowing what someone feels so strongly about that he or she would bother smashing into 140 characters?