Social media – bigger than sliced bread but not quite so tasty

There's a lot of pressure to keep up with the social media wudnerkinds these days. How many followers do you have? How many people are in your network? How many comments did your last blog post get?

It's a bit more difficult to measure the effectiveness of a B2B Facebook campaign when your measurable targets are the number of fans you have and how many likes you get for your status update but as we learned in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg didn't have B2B companies in mind when he came up with the idea.

I take issue with the Like button. Some users seem to misinterpret its meaning as 'I have read and absorbed the information contained in this message'. You 'like' the breaking news story that there's been a natural disaster on the other side of the world? Really? The interweb is full of weirdos so be careful out there kids.

So why bother with Facebook if you're a B2B company? Well, why not? The beauty of social media is that it's always evolving and there's still no right or wrong way to do things. Social media is so ubiquitous that people are interested to see clever, engaging campaigns and despite the claims of sef proclaimed social media gurus, it's not an exact science and you could be on the verge of the next runaway successful online campaign.

Earlier this year Facebook overtook Google's search page as the most visited website for the first time and automatically feeding your blog and twitter feeds into Facebook status updates can boost search engine optimization results. What's not to 'like'?

A crash course in social media

I'm very much in the 'late adopter' category when it comes to social media. This is, in part, down to pure laziness. I prefer to sit back and let someone else do the work and test out new applications, the latest technologies and build an existing network that I can tap into without  much effort on my part.

Professionally, this was the year I found social media having an impact on my professional life as up until this point I was a very light Facebook user. That soon changed as more and more consumer clients in the Dublin PR agency where I worked wanted to jump on the social media bandwagon and were prepared to invest resources into making it a success. With zero budget available from the client for creative design or advertising support, we created Facebook pages from the ground up and all growth was organic.

When I decided to leave Dublin for the bright lights of London this summer social media got a starring role on my CV.  I was still completely skeptical about the impact social media could have for a brand but I knew that inevitably I'd end up in a job where I'd need to step up to the plate and offer a client advice on their social media strategy.

Now, I'm working for a PR agency who are genuinely invested in social media as a value added service for their PR clients. Support is available when needed, from monitoring emerging trends to suggesting blog topics and tweet calendars right down to bringing clients back down to earth when they throw out the suggestion of investing their entire communications budget into twitter!

I may have started off this job as a social media skeptic but I'm slowly coming round to it and this blog is just one step in my attempt to shake off my cynicism, keep up to speed with new social media trends and learn from the truly great campaigns happening right now.