Why Businesses Don’t Love Twitter – Like You Do!

September 18th, 2009

This post is directed to all the individuals that just love Twitter and can’t understand why so many businesses don’t just jump in.

Over the last month or so, I’ve had conversations with individuals from Lowes HQ, Family Dollar HQ, Allen Tate executives, and others. These conversations range from brief discussions at a trade shows to consulting to teaching personalized classes.

When you actually talk with businesses about Social Media, it becomes clearer why they have not simply “jumped in”. It also becomes clearer that most individuals that simply use Social Media do not appreciate the difference.

Why You Love Twitter

If you personally use Twitter, you probably like it for these reasons…

Finding Others
Connecting with Others
Fun and/or Learning
Staying Informed
Access to Others

The more you use Social Media, the more you think more businesses should do so also. After all, wouldn’t it be great to find, connect, learn, stay informed, and access ALL individuals and ALL businesses?

But it’s not quite that easy.

Why Businesses are Scared of Twitter

Even small businesses need to think twice before just jumping in.

At first, Twitter looks like a great marketing opportunity. And it is! After all, check out these stats…

Radio – 38 years to reach 50 million listeners
Television – 13 years to reach 50 million users
Internet – 4 years to reach 50 million people
Facebook – 9 months to add 100 million users

Twitter isn’t on that list, but you get the idea. Social Media is huge. And marketing wants to jump all over it. Go where the people are!

But when your marketing department starts using Twitter, it quickly finds out that people will start talking back. (This media is two-way. It’s not like radio, tv, and magazines!)

So Twitter becomes a customer service issue. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to see how it could become a legal issue, a PR issue, and even an HR issue.

It’s Just Not as Easy for Businesses

See why businesses want to have a plan for using Social Media? See why they all need a Social Media Policy document? (I’ll be posting more about that later.)

So if you are an individual that simply USES Social Media, please be nice to the small and large businesses out there. Many of them want to get involved, but they are going to do it at their own speed. Many of them are making remarkable progress, too.

Let’s be supportive and assist where we can.

Social Media Training

If you are ready to move past just USING Social Media and want to start Social Media MARKETING, please check out our class on it. The next one is September 24, 25.

http://www.WebBusinessFreedom.com Brandon Uttley

Corey,

It does bother many individuals and entrepreneurs that a lot of big businesses, seemingly with endless resources, are not “getting” social media and adopting it faster. But there are many reasons, some of which you point out.

Many big companies are not set up to deal with social media. After all, it is an emerging discipline, and it is often not clear where it “fits” within certain companies. Many huge entities are still defining the roles and are in the process of hiring people specifically to tackle social media.

Also, a lot of companies are in regulated industries (e.g., banking, health care) and as such they must be super-careful about what and how they communicate. A lot are working diligently to resolve legal and HR issues–before they dive headfirst into social media channels. To the mainstream public, it appears they are absent and clueless–when in fact they are spending lots of time, money and resources trying to figure this new realm out.

So to your point–we do need to take these things into consideration, and cut some companies slack. Just because it’s possible to use social media readily doesn’t mean every company can do so, without a lot of careful forethought and effort.
http://www.mouseandman.com Fred Sexton

Yes, there are many reasons for why companies haven’t as rapidly accepted social media. However, I think the big question for many companies is the “How”. I think that most people see that it’s important. They see these press releases about how much it’s growing and TV stories and case studies of cool companies that are really getting it. But when it gets down to it they simply are left asking themselves the question, “How do I do it?”…”How do I make time to tweet?”, “How do I track the success of my campaign?”, “How much does it cost?”, “How much of a return will I get?”. Some of these questions, as you to allude to above, can be attributed to more kinds of traditional marketing thinking. This is why education is key and (here it comes) that’s why I think classes like yours are invaluable because you show them how to do it.
http://www.HippoIM.com Corey Creed

Nice comment, Fred. Thanks for the vote of confidence for our training classes. If I remember correctly, you do some training from time to time also!
http://www.marketresearchsalessecrets.com Steve

Whilst I understand the above comments and don’t disagree with any of those reasons you have mentioned, the fact of the matter is that all businesses should be getting on board without delay, in some form.

Those businesses that don’t sit up and take notice and start montioring social media (quickly) to see what people are saying about them are going to inflict damage upon themselves by not participating. Look at what happened at United Airlines ($180m or was it £’s wiped off their share price overnight?).

Yesterday lunchtime I tweeted the fact that an airline hadn’t refunded my money from 3 months ago (despite 4 emails, no acknowledgements, & the prospect of a £3.00 per minute call to a help desk in abroad and/or or the prospect of having to write to the Head office) – yesterday I got paid! They called me! How many times does that happen? This would never have happened if not for Twitter and social media.

The reality is that businesses, especially the big corporates SHOULD be s**t scared, because there has been a huge shift in power to the consumer via social media. We can now instantly tell the companies really how bad they are especially at customer service, which at best was pretty c**p, and share it with the world! The banking industry moreso should be terrified of social media as they all have a short term ‘screw the customer’ attitude and ‘we don’t give a damn about customer service’. Unfair? No, I worked in the industry for 19 years and decided to get out when I saw what was happening.

My personal view is that social media is possibly the best thing that could ever have happened from a consumer’s perspective. I’d like to think it will sort out the men from the boys and those that don’t improve their customer service at least, don’t deserve to be in business and making profits. It’s high time that business owners and management woke up and I think that this medium is the catalyst to shock them out of their thousand year long slumber. (They probably see it as a nightmare!)