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Using E-strategies for new Corporate Dynamics
Having a proper E-strategy, using web 2.0 networking tools such as Social Media or web 3.0 communication Virtual Reality for dynamic client interaction is essential if you want to connect to your clients in a way that adds Value to your business in the 21ste century. Nevertheless it all starts with a simple web 1.0 lesson: You need to Profile yourself properly in order to be 'found' by clients using search engines. Also you need to know how to 'find' targeted clients niches and how to select them online as well. After that, you need to be able to search and interact with the right people online avoiding those that just cost you time and don't add any Value to your real life business goals.. World economic shifts, what is happening where?
The internet is also changing rapidly, it is no longer a place where you just have 'a website' and hope that the clients will find it, it now has reached our TV's, set top boxes, game-computers, videos, navigation hardware, etc. through widgets which form the new internet. Your clients want to be served anywhere on every platform using their favorite widgets on their favorite networking portal. Since you don't have the time to use and manage all those thousands of tools and portals, you will quickly notice that you need a web 2.0 and 3.0 strategy aggregating everything into manageable centralized actions. Social media; hype, sense or nonsense? Stating that Social media has become a 'hype' is somewhat of an understatement. Over the past few years I must say that I have been amazed at the growth in interest, not just by people wanting to share their social life, but also by companies trying to find new marketing openings. As with everything that people don't fully understand, social media also comes with a lot of assumptions about 'how to best achieve corporate value'. It also amazed me to notice how long it took before there even was a discussion raised about the ROI of social media activities. In fact, we just 'did it' hoping that we would get something in return, in the long run. '..Give and thou shall receive..' seemed to be the gospel. When we noticed that just 'doing it' didn't result in any meaningful growth in new business leads, we were quick to point out other, more softer values to target such as general brand exposure and probable positive brand sentiment fall-out. Or newly self-proclaimed social media experts convinced everyone that we were doing it wrongly and provided us with new models in which all the best-practice key-words such as 'listening, learning, interacting, participating, sharing, etc. etc.' where brought together with beautiful arrows in charts, looking very plausible indeed. Naturally they pointed out the odd social media success-stories of Brands like 'Old-Spice, Nike and Obama', although these had no similarities with the sexy-ness of your Corporate Brand whatsoever. Again, no-one seemed to really care for the hard numbers, no one really focused on the one and only central question we all should have asked: How much Time and Effort does it really take in order to achieve what ROI? Management Boards are now discovering for themselves that social media for companies is quite something different than just having fun and sharing socially on a personal basis. Finally, we do seem to realize that we can measure things like Content and Brand impact in social media, their added value in generating new business. Also the softer data can become 'hard' data e.g. by analyzing social sentiment about our corporate projects, products and we even found out what the Impact of our Advocates online where. Yet we suddenly realized that we have incorporated a huge new workforce of social media enthusiasts with no real knowledge of your company processes and expertise and thus had no real sense of corporate value. it was just impossible for them to make the transition of their actions towards planning a business case in social media. An eruption of anger and disappointment in social media expertise is therefore imminent, just because it is valid. I expect the current social media industry to erode away as soon as this Knowledge becomes mainstream. Only a few will be able to survive and they probably will abandon the words 'social media' completely and adopt 'corporate e-dynamics' instead. As said, the focus on the tools such as Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn were non-interesting ego-aspects such as amounts of 'followers' and 'fans' rules, will not likely result in meaningful business. Instead try to focus on:
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