It’s not just social anymore

I came from the manufacturing sector which caters to the fashion industry. I remember having so many brainstorming sessions with the country’s top advertising agencies. I patiently sit for hours as the creative team showed me storyboard after storyboard, politely nodding my head at appropriate times. I’m aware that those brilliant people were giving their best to wow me with their presentation.

I had to fight for my ad budget then. I had to convince the board that the message I wanted to convey and the conversations I wanted to take place about the brand are worth the enormous amount of money I was asking for budget. And then came the “science” or media buys. I had to get slots in those programs with the widest reach, and I had to make sure that the timing of the ads would coincide with the launching of our new lines. Then I’d pray that with all of those marketing efforts, the money invested would translate to increased sales and, more important, to increased respect for the brand.

Today, I post a few sentences on my Facebook pages, and those few sentences acquires a reach of possibly a million plus readers, maybe even more since Facebook readership and viewership grow every day. As I write this, my Facebook post or tweet or blog could already have a few hundred thousand people following it. There’s interaction going on, and all it took was for me to spend a few minutes organizing my thoughts and a few more to put them in writing. Or typing. I never imagined years ago that this would be possible today.

Many businesses are caught off-guard by the boom of social networks. They take it as a passing trend, missing out on a great marketing opportunity. Most businesses concern themselves more with their employees wasting paid company time doing Facebook than with figuring out how social network platforms can enhance their businesses. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is laughing his way to the bank.

Did you know that the millennials, better known as Generation Y in America, have social network access in the workplace as one of their top considerations in joining a company, and that they’d refuse an opportunity to work for a company that doesn’t allow it?

While many companies block office computers from accessing Facebook or Twitter, these and other social network platforms remain accessible to employees through their smart phones. This reminds me of the early stages of email. When the idea of emails was just being introduced into the work sphere, many companies had kept their employees from using it for fear of security breaches. Today, we look back to that time and couldn’t quite believe people were had actually thought that about emails.

A client or a consumer who hits a “like” or “follow” button is offering your business or brand an opportunity to have a direct relationship with him or her. But many brands and businesses today respond by blasting back impersonal offers and specials. This isn’t relationship building; this is simply going back to broadcast advertising. Here’s the key to understanding the phenomenon of social media: it’s no longer about social media; it’s more about making your brand and business more social! The next few years will be about these direct relationships cultivated in mass scale. The immediate future will be all about how well a business or a brand can make their connections stronger, more credible and more personal. It’s no longer about looking at the numbers in the database and blasting them with advertising messages; it’s now all about growing relationships and making connections even stronger.

I never knew that my Facebook “Like” page would grow that big and that fast. And I never knew how potent such a page would be until one troubled teenager messaged me privately about how one of my daily posts had actually ministered to her while she’s going through a difficult time and kept her from taking her own life. To me, this is what social media is about.

Social media – it isn’t about to go away. It’s here to stay, at least for a long while.

We can use it for godly purposes. So let’s use it for the good of many.

(Develop your leadership skills and life skills by spending two whole days with Francis Kong on November 21-22 at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. Call Inspire at 09158055910, or 632-6310912 for details. Connect with him via his Facebook page, www.facebook.com/franciskong2.)