You’ve started a fan page for your company on Facebook. You’ve attracted a few followers on Twitter. You’ve got a presence on Foursquare, and you’ve started offering deals to customers through Groupon. Seems you’ve got that whole social media thing figured out.
Or do you? While social media presents, first and foremost, a cheap marketing and advertising option to help businesses generate leads and drive up revenue, some experts insist it’s about more than just setting up a few profiles and then moving on.
“Social technologies are to me holistic technologies, a lot like PCs or the Internet,” said Scott Klososky, a social media business consultant who’s releasing three new books on the subject this year. “I tell clients that they need to be using social tools as much internally as they do externally, as much to cut costs as they do to drive revenue.”
Klososky, whose clients range from managers at Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs, encourages businesses to integrate different social technology tools into their day-to-day operations in a couple of different ways.
‘RAISING THE IQ’
One method Klososky suggests to managers is encouraging employees to build personalized “rivers of information” that push specialized, real-time information about their industry or expertise to them by way of social technology tools such as RSS readers, Twitter and Digg. A fairly simple idea one might argue, but a practice that many companies underestimate, said Klososky.
