5 things to tell your colleagues that still don’t get social media

1/ It’s active, even if you’re not
Even if you or your business is not actively listening or engaging with your customers in social media, your business, product, industry, advocates, detractors are being talked about. My own firm is talked about with mainly positive and neutral sentiment hundreds of times a month on Twitter alone. Our products and industry is mentioned hundreds of times an hour.

2/ Social media is principally an online representation of what happens in the real world
In the real world we share news, photos of our children, birthday wishes and invitations, just as at work we invite clients to events, talk about products and share results. I appreciate that not everyone we work with has friends or anything interesting to say. For those that do, social media has proven itself as the easiest and most immediate way to share.

3/ What we do online stays online
I am not convinced privacy is dead, but the super injunction nonsense of the past few weeks illustrates that it is probably on its last legs. So be careful, by all means. Contrary to point 2, don’t do everything online that you would do offline, it sticks.

A large part of the success of Linked In is due to its online representation of our CVs (Resumes). Now it is a universal truth, not widely discussed, that everyone’s CVs contain a little fiction. Don’t fall into this trap, social media allows everything to be checked and verified.

4/ If you don’t engage in social media, your competitors will
Social media is by no means ubiquitous, certainly not in the developed world. But it will be. Orkut, a Facebook me too in Brazil has 84% penetration and continues to grow. Similarly renren and 51 in China, Vkontakte in Russia and Bharatstudent in India all have following on a scale that would dwarf the populations of some small European states.

Social media will become a default communications tool for most people under the age of 40 by the time the football World Cup reaches Russia in 2018, especially in the fastest growing economies with the youngest demographics such as the BRIC nations. Corporate websites will become increasingly obsolete as communities interested in a topic or product come together online, with or without your business.

Successful businesses are finding the communities that are interested in their solutions, and listen to the conversation before engaging.

5/ The big numbers aren’t the true story
Facebook is predicted to have a billion users by the end of 2012, and social media will reach 90% penetration of all internet users in 2013. By the summer of 2012, half of all mobile phone users in Europe will use smart phones. In the UK, nearly 26 million adults have Facebook accounts. Of all UK Facebook users, 50% are over 36.

However, the power of social media is isn’t in its scale alone, it is in the quality everyone’s connections. People for time in memorial have asked people they trust before making a purchase, and social media has accelerated this. Amazon understands it, and the travel industry is coming to grips with it through Trip Advisor. Havas Media’s research in 2010 found 62% of UK shoppers consult online communities before buying and 34% have looked at an online review at least once before making a purchase.

Which takes us nicely back to point 1. Social media is active, even if you are not.