22Oct2009
Social media in service business
I was yesterday one of the many presenters at a very interesting seminar on social media and service business with a special focus in travel. There were a lot of interesting presentations on how different social media services have been used in marketing. Quite many people thought that the term social media is pretty bad as the different services serve very different purposes. To prove the point there were many questions by the audience on the subject like “what are the first steps to get into social media” and “should you build your own platform or use existing ones” etc. Such questions can’t be answered before first understanding what the company wants to achieve as the means depend totally on the goals. Starting to tweet is different from founding a fan page in Facebook or using TripAdvisor to boost your visibility or building your own community site like Aurinkomatkat, a large Finnish tour operator, has done for their customers when they built Paikka auringossa (in Finnish only). Interesting fact about that site by the way is that the average age of users is 52 years, more proof on the fact that people of all ages use social media.
In my presentation I referred to an interesting study by Beresford research regarding social networking sites and their users. That definitely is worth reading to anyone interested in how people use social media. The results were pretty surprising, e.g. users spent on average 22 hours per week in social networking sites and social networking was regarded as third most important activity after email and going out with friends, leaving behind things like sports and watching TV. A bit scary I think!
There were a lot of people asking for concrete results for using social media in marketing, concrete results here meaning money and ROI. As a sales guy I totally understand the need for ROI that but still in some ways I found that strange. The same people who don’t see the ROI in social media (what ever that means) don’t hesitate to spend money on TV, radio or print ads. Those, after all, are much harder to measure than something done on the web. Perhaps this is partly explained by the feeling that if you do a campaign on TV you believe that a lot of people will see that whereas if you do it on the web you can keep count exactly how many (or few) people joined your Facebook group or fan page or what ever. Personally I haven’t seen any TV ads in years and a small poll amoung friends confirmed the same. Due to digital TV people are skipping TV ads completely. The only “radio ad” I remember is “this is Jonathan from Spotify…”. I don’t register print ads at all. Perhaps advertisers find it easier to believe that TV/radio/print works because of the big potential reach rather than to actually run a campaign that can be measured showing that their message or service doesn’t actually interest very many people. I don’t know of course, that just a thought. 
On the other hand there are many other ways of using social media than creating a Facebook fan page or starting to tweet. Creating a community or working with an existing community like TripSay can offer several benefits from SEO to better understanding and segmentation of your customers. Not to mention the most important thing which is to offer your customers a service they like. You have to think of your customers first. What is it that you can offer them that helps them or otherwise interests them. You have to think about what you can do with the information you collect that honestly benefits your customers and at the same time helps you to get to your goal, like increased sales. It’s definitely harder than just running a one size fits all mass media campaign and hoping someone will notice.
Posted by juha
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