Social Media In Business – the future is now January 10, 2012

2012 has arrived and, as with all new years, it brings in the promise of the future as well as reflections on the past. When this happens we tend to get caught up in the line items – caught up in looking at specific things that did, or did not, happen. Don’t get me wrong – I love this level of accountability, and I think we are all the better for it. In fact, I find it so valuable I do it myself every year. However, in this post I’d like to take a brief moment to make a comment about the larger trend, it’s an obvious one, but an important one none the less. Social media in business is no longer coming soon, and it’s no longer about to explode – it is here and because it is here the market is going to go through a huge shift. I can’t help but shake my head every time I see someone publish data about how the growth of social media in business is slowing down and then draw the conclusion that it is not the market it once was. If you take a closer look at the numbers it rapidly becomes clear that the growth of the market isn’t slowing because companies are losing interest, it’s because they are already there. It’s easy to have eye-popping growth when a market is in its infancy but once it’s up and running those growth numbers inherently slow down. I believe the reason we are seeing some slowing in the adoption rate of social media in business is because the market is moving into a new phase – it’s tool time.

Social get’s results – we can argue about what kind of results and we can argue about measuring those results, but it’s pretty apparent that social media can have a huge impact on your business. What will that impact be? The question is, what do you want it to be? The answer will depend on several key questions you have to ask yourself about your market, customers, culture and objectives. Currently there are many powerful tools on the market that can help you pursue, and hopefully achieve, your objectives and there are many more coming to market everyday. It’s hard to keep up with the flow of new things to look at – but that’s because the market has arrived and now it’s time to carefully select the products and services that will allow you to achieve your goals. So we’re back to an age old question – what do you want to do? The clearer you are with the answer to that question the more successful you will be in finding the products and services that deliver results that matter. But be careful – it’s easy to say ‘I want to grow sales’ or ‘I want to have a million customers’ but you won’t find tools that speak to those results. Your mission is to answer the question ‘how do I get from where I am today to where I’d like to be tomorrow?’. In other words, you’ll still be asking yourself the same questions you always have, however now you’ll be shopping for social media tools to help you get there.