Given that most of us claim to be too busy to do anything anymore-and it is somewhat true. Traipsing in and bellowing to anyone who will listen, that the tranformative nature of social media will change the way you do business for the better, is a lofty claim.
Let’s do a hypothetical. What if you could only use one “social solution”? Which would you use? and why would you use it? Let’s say you’re a consultant, which social media solution would you suggest and why? Which one is going to have the largest impact on your company? On your business? For your client? What if you’re boss said, “Pick one”, and given that that’s a minor miracle he said that-which will give you the firm footing to do more later on down the line? The most impact? Results?
This is kind of important for a number of reasons-not the least of being that some solutions are just not a good fit for some types of organizations. The reasons could be limited resources, limited time, money or whatever-but you just don’t go and jam a generic social solution into every company just because they want one. You’re going to set yourself up to fail if you do that.
Just because a company can set up a Facebook fan page for example- does that mean that it will give them the biggest bang for their efforts? Maybe, maybe not. What is going to give them the biggest return, the biggest impact? You can only choose one.
Let’s short list 11 high level social media solutions and tools right now.
- YouTube
- A Ning Like community or Forum solution
- A Blog
- Social Bookmarking
- Flickr
- Podcasting
- Wiki
- Social Monitoring
Each of the above have specific bells and whistles that allow you to do certain things. Remind me again, what’s the goal of social media? To have conversations? To sell stuff? To grow the business? To enrich Customer service? HR? Competitive intelligence? PR? Collaboration? Which one could do all of those? I got a better idea. Maybe you should just concentrate on one specific social “thing” that will make your organization better?
Ahhhh haaaaa… That’s it! Which one can do one thing that can make your organization better at what they do? You don’t need to try or “do” every social media solution to be successful. Just one-Doing one thing really, really well, will work.
