by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
Nothing, is probably what you’re thinking! Because what relevance has a 5000 year old monument got to today’s digital world. On the face of it, very little but as I was driving past Stonehenge the other day I was blown away by the vision and purpose of the people who built it.
Let’s think back to a time when people had a short life expectancy and simply to feed yourself sufficiently to stay alive and healthy was a full-time job. Against this backdrop people cut and shaped a series of 25 ton granite stones (without metal tools) and transported them 150 miles (from Wales to Salisbury Plain) then erected them to form the stone circle that we see today. Amazing…what vision. Why not simply take the easy option and build the circle out of wood? Well, because wood isn’t the best material. Wood isn’t a permanent solution. Wood would be taking the easy option…
Which brings me on to the plumbing of your company…internal comms, sales, marketing, HR…all of which SHOULD be based on social media.
So why should you use social media to do this things?
Well, because social media is a “natural” place for people to be. People have chosen of their own volition to use social media networks to organise their lives, share their experiences, listen to music, watch videos, suggest any manner of things to their friends, friends of friends and indeed the entire world. The frictionless nature of communication on social channels is an extremely effective way of spreading ideas and helping people to learn about each other (particularly useful in a corporate environment).
But, it’s not easy. It’s not easy because the people involved need to do the work and this requires buy-in and a change in behaviour and these are extremely difficult things to achieve at scale.
Easy, is buying advertising, email marketing, banners, events (the things that you have been doing for years) which is just paying someone else to do the work that you (and your colleagues) should be doing yourselves. All of these methods won’t work long term because i) they are all reducing in their effectiveness (as pretty much every study shows), and ii) these all work on the fundamentally floored idea that paying someone else to make your business successful is somehow more effective than making your business successful yourself.
I know that you are thinking that marketing automation (for example) is in fact quite successful…but it’s only successful when compared to email-blasts. And, the advent of GDPR (and other legislation) makes it increasingly problematic to (legally) use this format as a way of generating business.
Social media on the other hand is growing (in terms of population and about of time spent per head on it) and is yet to be exploited by most businesses.
So, back to Stonehenge, and ask yourself – do you want to build a long-term sustainable process which will last indefinitely (like the builders of Stonehenge…or do you want to take the easy option!
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/its-time-for-your-enterprise-to-run-on-social/
http://www.social-experts.net/on-holiday-will-you-phone-home-for-the-football-results/
http://www.social-experts.net/someone-who-is-big-in-the-social-selling-world-has-written-something-that-i-take-exception-to/
