

Ask HN: Social Networks and Business? - jbm

I managed to impress a manager at a local Fortune 500 company during a class we had at the local chamber of commerce - to the point where he asked me to stop by his shiny new office and give him a run down of how businesses are leveraging social networks for their own purposes.  He was particularly interested in how Twitter was used.<p>To make sure there is no misunderstanding, they aren't a web development company; they aren't planning on building a social network.  He just wants to know a bit about how they are used, in businesses themselves and as a tool to advance the business.<p>I was thinking about the Dell example (how they advertise sales on Twitter), and about how the "fun factor" of social networks can be engineered into traditionally stodgy applications to produce better results (I planned on showing him the beta of Thymer as an example of a twitter-like interface used in project management).<p>I admit, however, that my expertise is limited, especially compared to the gurus here.  HN, please help me end my brush with unemployment!  (If this leads to anything, you're all welcome to spend a night or two at my place if you're in Tokyo :) )
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markessien
Start off by taking a look at the 'Coke' group on facebook. They have more
that 3 million facebook users who have joined the group. Each of those users
invites other users to join the group. Now Coke can 'push' a message to
everyone of those 3 million users without any cost at all. It's advertisement,
but there is no budget at all!

But it's more than that, Coke can actually look at what its biggest fans want.
They have a 3 million strong userbase against which they can run surveys, see
what the feeling about marketing campaigns is, etc.

Also, everybody who searches for a particular persons name on google will
likely see his facebook page appearing. The public search listing for the
person includes the message 'Coke'. This is akin to a personal recommendation
from one person to another, that coke is good. This is a dream scenario for a
brand.

Twitter is useful when the brand is a personality. People want to interact
with brands who are personalities, and twitter offers a direct way to do so,
and create personal nuance in the brand.

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billroberts
Some non-twitter thoughts:

If you haven't already read the Cluetrain Manifesto, then you should.
(www.cluetrain.com). 10 years old now but lots of good stuff about why a
business should be interested in social networks.

Also LinkedIn groups: lots of people are using those as a way of getting
involved in conversations relevant to their businesses - representing their
companies, not just as individuals.

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jlees
There was an example on last week's TwiT of some American cold-remedy company
scanning Twitter for people saying they had a cold, and @-ing them with a
discount voucher.

<http://twitter.com/Zicam>

There's also the sub-group of 'enterprise social networks', helping people
within an organisation connect better.

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tonystubblebine
My SO has done a bunch of good work on the topic of Twitter for business. My
bias aside, I've been on Twitter since day one, use it for marketing and
support of my business, and have it integrated into my products and I still
found a lot of useful things in the materials below:

Free: Twitter for Business Webcast.

<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1162>

Pay: Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution O'Reilly Radar Report

<http://radar.oreilly.com/research/twitter-report.html>

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jaxn
I think Dell is more complex than just advertising sales. There are people
with a specific product category focus that watch and respond to customer
feedback. Another good example is Griffin.

The value of social media is as a two-way communication channel. With
search.twitter.com it is easier than ever to hear what customers are saying
and interact with them when they are struggling with your product/services.

If you provide a great customer experience you keep customers as long as your
provide a great experience. If you screw up and fix it beyond their
expectations you have a customer for life. (or something like that)

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jbm
I'm not sure what Griffin is - tried googling it, but a mess of results with
no common theme came up.

I hear the "Instant awareness" thing. I should probably look up an example of
this before I go in though. I think I read an article about that here a while
back (how Twitter is a potential competitor to Google because of its faster
reaction to changes in public mood)

I don't think the customer service angle will work in the context of the
company I'm dealing with. The company has certification programs and its main
product is in use with banks and other large companies - I don't think the
president of Citibank is going to twit about how XYZ screwed up big time.
(That said, I wonder if I can explain how it might be a good way to reach out
to hacker-types)

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jaxn
Griffin Technology. The make iPod accessories and such.

Wait, I am not sure the President would want to be on Twitter at all. However,
Citibank runs ads and marketing campaigns, they have customer service, they
run PR campaigns. Twitter is a tool that those departments can use to actively
listen and respond to their customers.

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iamelgringo
I find that a lot of us are using Twitter as a replacement for email. It
carries several advantages to traditional email:

Conversations are made public, and therefore are searchable, and they're
shorter, eliminating the overhead of sending an actual email.

I actually think that there's a huge business case for setting up internal
twitter systems in businesses. Being able to publicly broadcast small updates
on a project via twitteresque system would be very useful.

If he's interested in setting up such a system internally, we would be happy
to provide that for a small fee. :)

~~~
jbm
That's why I planned on showing him Thymer - <http://thymer.com/>

It's exactly that, and it's full of y-combinator goodness :) Ever since I
started using it, my productivity doubled.

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vaksel
just go to one of "social media" experts video blogs and watch a bunch of
their videos:

i.e. someone like <http://garyvaynerchuk.com/>

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garply
I almost ended up using Comcast's "Comcast Cares" Twitter account the other
day due to a billing mistake.

[http://twitter.com/comcastcares?sess=7fd22e18b74852a62dc6659...](http://twitter.com/comcastcares?sess=7fd22e18b74852a62dc6659b7437c3e0)

As annoyed as I am with my frequent service outages and the billing error, I
really like the notion that I can complain publicly and have their response
(or lack thereof) also be made public.

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cos
Some of the most interesting new ground in this field is happening in politics
and music, so I recommend looking at those.

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c00p3r
Broadcast something useful and interesting under your brand or product name.

These social networks is just a kind of media (with very limited format in
Twitter's case) so the content is what matters.

