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In the ever expanding and accessible social media enabled web, businesses are increasingly networking, marketing, selling and collaborating online. This new business environment provides significant opportunities for business networks and groups to offer additional value to their members and increase revenue.
Business associations can effectively leverage the powerful and often low cost social media tools to substantially:
• enhance networking and collaboration amongst members - bridging the gaps between physical events to provide members with greater and ongoing networking, business promotion, knowledge sharing and collaboration opportunities.
• extend members’ reach - member networking opportunities with businesses outside the organization.
• facilitate communication and interaction with members – engaging and building stronger relationship with members, and opportunities to capture member requirements.
• increase visibility and recognition for the organization – promoting services, reaching potential members and collaborating with other organizations.
While the business associations can greatly benefit from social media tools to keep their members satisfied and attract new members, they face real challenges in terms of both expertise and time requirements, in setting up and managing relevant and effective presence in the ever evolving social media channels.
Getting the right help to ensure strong, active and efficient presence on the social Web will pay off in speeding up success and avoiding costly mistakes. For example, an experienced community manager can grow, engage and guide your online communities using tools such as forums, blogs and posting on social networks at the right place, at the right time and with the right content.
Please share your experience on why business associations should care about using the social media and guest blog on this topic are welcome here.
Leverage the power of social media in your activities before, during and after the event to significantly boost your success. Here are five important event organizing activities that can be performed a lot more effectively and efficiently using social media:
1) Recruiting Sponsors, Volunteers, Speakers and Partners:
Leverage your LinkedIn and other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to find sponsors for location, food and door prizes easily and quickly. Post your needs on these networks and amaze yourself by how many offers you get. [Tip: think of an incentive and make them an offer they can't refuse!] If your direct contacts can’t help, then quite possibly, some of them would refer you to somebody who can. You could also find volunteers the same way if you highlight the excellent networking and self development value your contacts will get by helping with your event.
As for getting a speaker, if you don’t have who you are looking for in your own professional network(s), some of your contacts might in which case, they can refer you and help you establish contact with a good speaker.
Looking for a like-minded business association or group to co-host the event and share the effort, costs and benefits with you? Again, dig deep into your circles of contacts on social networks.
2) Marketing:
Continue reading …
The magic of social media marketing is that the payback can be huge, and it can be simple, quick and low cost to execute. Like businesses, business associations could equally leverage it to their advantage to attract new members and retain their existing ones. However, marketing through social media, magnifies your association’s value proposition; and if you don’t have anything unique and compelling, then it will be very hard to out-shout the competition.
With social media marketing, you need to define your points of differentiation to a greater degree and communicate them effectively. Also, as social media marketing encompasses many messages across multiple platforms (B2B networks, Facebook, Twitter, expert blogs, your own blog, etc…) you have to make sure that you tell the right version of your story to the right audience on the right platform. Like traditional marketing, Social media marketing requires good planning in order to work. Continue reading …
In one of my earlier blog posts I talked about why you should care about leveraging the social web for your business. Here are eight practical tips to get started:
1) Watch, Listen & absorb – It is essential to understand how your customers and your competitors are using the social media. Visit their website and find out where they are active on the social Web. To start with, check out what they are doing on Fcaebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. Learn about the various social media channels and how they could be of use to your business. There are many interesting blogs on the use social media – find them and follow them. Here are some reading suggestions:
Chris Brogan’s Blog
Social Media Examiner
Mashable
2) Think objectives, coordination & audience – Your social media efforts should satisfy your business’s requirements and marketing objectives, not blindly follow cool trends. Start by defining specific, practical and actionable objectives and then define a strategy to achieve them quickly and cost effectively. For example, you might want to create buzz and excitement (your strategy) in introducing a new product to the market (your objective), or you might want to convince consumers of certain benefits of your product (your strategy) in enticing them to buy (your objective).
Make sure that your various social media tactics work together in implementing your strategy and achieving your goals. For example, the subject and timing of your blog posts and discussions on various social networking platforms should build on, support and leverage each other to strengthen a marketing campaign.
It is also important that your social media activities are not in isolation, but integrated and coordinated with your other traditional forms of business activities such as e-mail marketing, banner adds, cross channel promotion and search engine marketing (buying keyword based ads).
When it comes to thinking about targeting your audience, don’t forget your customers’ social influencers; that is, the circles of people influencing your customer’s purchasing decisions such as a wife, husband, friend, work peer, or an expert through online conversations. Continue reading …
The short answer is because your stakeholders are on it.
In the case of businesses, your customers, your partners, your suppliers and yes, your competitors are most likely active in the ever expanding and accessible social media enabled web. So, you should be too in order to attract more customers, access more suppliers and find potential partners.
Businesses are increasingly networking, marketing, recruiting and collaborating online. They also conduct low cost and highly effective customer/member services and market research using social media channels and tools. You too have to get serious about doing business in a new, more interactive and collaborative way. The social web empowers you to intensify relationships with your customers or members, securing their trust, respect and loyalty, building excitement around your offerings and getting referrals.
If you are managing a business association, your members, your sponsors, your volunteers and yes, your competitors are using the social web. So, you should be too in order to attract more members, sponsors and support.
Business associations are using the social web to offer additional networking and collaboration value for their members, communicate and interact more effectively with their members and gain wider exposure and recognition.
How to go about getting on the social web? See here for a good starting point.
More about why Business Associations should use social media? Check out this blog post.
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