Let me begin with listing down some reasons why you should not get your company on social media.

• You want to be on it because everyone else is

• You do not understand the ‘purpose of being’ on social media

• You do not have a ‘minimum time to spend’ that you can dedicate on a daily basis

• You do not have the ‘bandwidth’ to interact with people following you

• You do not have enough ‘thoughts’ (content) for the sake of updating

• You do not understand (and do not intend to understand) the difference between a blog, a forum, a micro blog, social bookmarking, social networking, professional networking, etc

• You want to simply sell/advertise your products/services and make fast money

Have stated the above, this list is by no means an exhaustive list and is not necessarily in an order of importance. The word ‘You’ is used to collectively term you as a person, as a company, and as a team.

Not so long back, I received an email from an electrical equipment manufacturing and distributing company. The email was meant to announce about them foraying into social media. The spectrum of social media here was eleven different platforms viz. Forum, Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, YouTube, Metacafe, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr etc. I said to myself, “Interesting! Let us see how they manage to pull off their existence in all of them.”
Few weeks down, I visited all of the websites individually, only to find few (and different ones at that) of their employees ‘following’ each of the websites. While the websites showed a decent number of updates in the initial days of the launch, the frequency had gone down to no updates in 2 weeks at some of the websites. The updates in the initial few days were only about products that their company sells. Few weeks more, and I found out that the person who was running the show has quit. Result: The company has redundant presence on 11 different social media platform – and it is out there for the world to see (whenever it does).

Need of the hour is for companies such as these to understand the the whys, whens, whats, and hows of social media. It is imperative to understand that you need not be present on many social media platform to be looked upon as a social-media-savvy-company. If you want to be known as that, please take some effort to understand the difference between a blog, a forum, micro blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, etc. Once you understand these, you will realize, for instance, that if you have a forum running on your website, you DO NOT need a Facebook Group for discussions to take place. In fact, please try and understand the difference between a Facebook Profile, Facebook Page, and Facebook Group to begin with.  Ask yourself questions such as, "What purpose will updating on Twitter serve for my company? Drive Traffic unto the website? Keep them posted about all our activities? Do some promotions? Should my website have buttons to enable posting content unto social media, instead of just having button that leads to my social media pages?"

For the sake of understanding, at least look up online for whitepapers and presentations about Social Media. Here is a nice presentation by Olivier Blanchard about Basics of Social Media ROI. Here is another presentation by Yongfook. Do some research, talk to people who are already doing it, "SOCIALIZE" and then do it right!

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose  -  Richard Grant

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time  - Timothy Leary

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