I have talked before about people getting caught up in technology ‘fashions,’ and why that’s a worry, and of course Gartner is rightly famous for its ‘Hype Cycle’ which makes the same point – don’t get swept up in things just because everyone else is!

I am genuinely wondering whether this is happening with something that’s sort of crept up on us all: social media.

Social Media Charge
There seems to be an unstoppable charge towards every business ‘having’ to embrace everything to do with social media. But, social media is not the answer to everybody’s specific business problem. It is great in a lot of areas but, fact: for most companies in the UK, less than 1% of their business interactions are using this medium today.

I’m not saying that social media isn’t important. BUT there’s far too much budget and too much focus on the medium and too much ‘Oh, we need to do this to be relevant’ going on – and not enough time focusing on the business benefits.

People are rushing towards social media, believing this is going to ‘revolutionise’ their business, but they haven’t thought through the consequences. What happens or what strategy do you have? Can people order on something on Facebook? Can they order on Twitter?

Multi-Channel Customer Engagement Challenge
What’s too often missing: the right type of ideas are not being structured around how people are going to interact with social media. A lot better use of time and money and company focus should be on the day-to-day problems: when you look at any business they have multiple channels of contact and customer engagement coming in and out of their company, social media just adds another fragmented, disconnected channel of communication between the business and the customers.

There is not enough work being put into how can you bring all these channels together. In the second part of this discussion, I’d like to try and start articulating what a better approach to all this might be.

• 
•