More proof that New Media has helped businesses and interaction between people. There is a lot of discussion that innovations, such as email and Facebook, have basically stopped people from talking to each other altogether. Like the psychologist from my previous entry was discussing how Social Media has ruined human interaction.
To a certain extent this is quite true. I can’t even count the number of times I have spoken to a colleague through email that was literally in my line of sight. I do prefer to speak to people in person, but for many reasons, things like email have advanced our lived and productivity well beyong what it was before. Facebook takes it a step further by having more interaction with people through Facebook than you have in-person. You can always see how someone is feeling or what they are doing by simply checking their status, rather than just asking how or what someone is doing.
The Aberdeen Group recently did a study titles, “Customer 2.0: The Business Implications of Social Media.” Social Media has certainly changed the way regular people interact with one another, but it is mentioned in the study that Social Media has completely changed how customers have come to expect a certain level of interaction with companies. There is as much as 84% difference between customer satification of a company that has explored some sort of interaction with their customers and those that have not. This is certainly enough to look into how to use Social Media in a way that works best for your company.
Working for an association, it has been a challenge to find ways that are appropriate to incorporate Social/New Media into the communications plan. I believe the definition of New Media is very flexible. We made small changes such as audio recording or video recording rollout announcements of major studies and posting them on the website as podcasts or video. This may seem very basic, but when you are starting at square-one those little changes make a big impact. We then used this as a member service and advertised it on the member-only section of the website. The organization needed to start at square one to become introduced to the New Media arena. I think the number one rule is to go to where your audience is. You can’t just start at creating a Facebook application, if that is not where your audience is.
