Source: Adage.com

Although it is important to take them with a pinch of salt, statistics can be highly enlightening when it comes to describing states and trends. Social media is particularly well-described by statistics due to its very nature – it is essentially a game of numbers and this is part of what makes it compelling for so many users. A look into these statistics can therefore allow us to measure the magnitude of the social media phenomenon.

2012 has been a rather important year for social media as it has been one characterized by a lot of change and growth in this domain. Technologies have continued to move forward, and at the same time we have continued to see social media become more and more accepted by businesses and individuals. Social media has also been integrating itself into increasingly more facets of the Web and of business, and Google’s recent talk of ‘social search’ and its new baby Google Plus point towards social media becoming an ingrained part of SEO as well.

This info graphic lays out a few impressive and often fascinating statistics regarding leading social utilities. It is fair to say that Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular form of social media, with more than 800 million active Facebook users at present. The news is very good for businesses trying to market themselves through Facebook: 56% of consumers claim that they are more likely to recommend a brand if they have become its fan on Facebook and 77% of consumers interact with brands directly by reading posts and updates from the brands.

Another giant in social media is LinkedIn, which has 64 million users in North America alone as well as the 500 CEOs of the world’s top companies. Twitter is also booming exponentially, although behind Facebook in the social media race, with 100 million active Twitter users. 34% of marketers are taking advantage of the Twitter population by successfully generating leads through the network and 20% of these have actually closed deals.

A huge indicator of how mobile technology is growing hand in hand with social media is that 55% of Twitter users access the site through their smartphones. That is, more than half use this social media tool on the move, from unfixed locations. In fact, mobile technology is increasing the pace of the Internet revolution substantially. Tablet users, for example, consume much more as well as more diverse content on the Internet as the interactive and visual features built-in these devices encourage users to explore more content. At present, an impressive 3,5 billion items  - news stories, posts, web links – are shared each week.

To give a quick example of how this is affecting the business world: a study conducted in 2011 and looking at the restaurant industry concluded that consumers who use social media – whether Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, UrbanSpoon and apps among others – dine out more and are more likely to be return customers than those who do not. So social media not only generates many more leads, but also optimizes on loyalty programs – two avenues which organizations can really strategize on.

In short, social media is a big deal and continues to get bigger year on year. The obstacle with social media really lies in the fact that it is constantly changing and evolving and it is crucial that businesses stay on top of developments to utilize the sites in a positive and effective way.

Infographic by Grosocial

Surviving on the web is much like surviving in the wild – it’s a matter of ‘adapt or die’. Those sites and services which do not abide by this rule will soon fall out of favour with a fickle public. Just look at MySpace – how much have they changed since they were on top? And how would you say they are fairing against Twitter today?

Facebook knows this better than most and that is why we have seen a constant slew of updates and changes to the site since its launch. Each one has however been met with animosity by users who do not like change, but as a result the site has managed to stay relevant and popular.

The info graphic above – from www.Grosocial.com – elegantly demonstrates the sheer number of iterations Facebook has unleashed upon us since 2006 and serves as a very nice ‘microcosm’ of the way social networking has changed over the years – and the way in which it has become more and more ubiquitous with time.

For instance, as the info graphic shows, the initial Facebook design did not include a newsfeed. In other words, in a fashion similar to Friendster and other social networks before it, you would have had to navigate specifically to each article page in order to see what people were doing at the time. This feature that now seems such a crucial part of the Facebook experience was initially met with resistance as people saw their information suddenly broadcasted through their private network. The intensity of this backlash was such that Zuckerberg issued an apology on the official Facebook blog:

“We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.”

Of course this is all in the past now and Newsfeeds are a common aspect of all the major social networks.

Other Changes

This is only one of the big changes undertaken by Facebook, but there are many minor ones as well which have also had some impact on our day-to-day use of Facebook, from Facebook ‘deals’ to the various apps that make Facebook more of a cross-platform experience.

The biggest recent change however is undoubtedly the introduction of ‘Timeline’, which presents information in a new way by condensing all data collected over a long time period into a single page (almost like this info graphic does for Facebook itself). This is highly relevant to businesses and social marketing gurus and ‘brand timelines’ are already making their way onto Facebook.

Again there is criticism and controversy, and many people feel that the experience has been diluted one step too far. However if history has shown us anything, it is that most changes eventually end up being accepted, and perhaps that a little resistance is a good thing if it shakes things up and draws attention to novelties. For you, this means making sure that you are right there when the changes come, and that you adopt these early on in order to make the most out of this evolution. Do you have timeline yet? Well, what are you waiting for?

Communities present huge opportunities for organisations to find those interesting individuals for your business, whether these are customers, clients, suppliers or even competitors. And the great benefit of tapping into these communities is that you come across not one or two of these key players, but thousands of them at the same time.

As we saw in the article Social Media Applications Guide, social media provides major business opportunities for creating and finding communities through four main applications: marketplaces, social networks, blogs and micro-blogs, and virtual worlds. This article will explain how this exactly happens through some social media examples.

1. Marketplaces:

Sites around which e-commerce is taking place between users are marketplaces. E-commerce is the process of buying and selling services and/or goods online. Most online marketplaces are very user-friendly, offering a simple way for users to browse for items and buy them, or list items for sale. A business can therefore substantially increase its sales by participating in these marketplaces and reaching a large pool of key players, while increasing traffic towards their own websites at the same time.

• Apple store and android market: this is a marketplace for applications on mobile devices, where users can browse and find what they need or want. Worth noting here is that new mobile applications are coming out every single day, just as with social media applications. These mobile applications make it possible to extend your desktop onto your mobile devices and many social media tools already have mobile versions for their sites.
• eBay auction site: this is a marketplace where businesses and individuals sell all kinds of services and goods. According to the site, more than 94 million people use eBay every single day, which makes it the biggest online marketplace in the world.

Example: Mega electronics company Samsung sells its plasma TVs through eBay on top of its already established distribution channels. This makes the company’s plasma TVs easily accessible online, with online delivery possible as well. Also, going through eBay allows the company to get access to a huge worldwide online community – definitely boosting sales as a result. Finally, browsing for this product from eBay helps users to directly compare it with other similar products and see what they have to gain from buying the Samsung one.

2. Social networks:

Organisations can easily connect with key individuals or other organizations in their industry – such as customers, suppliers, clients, basically anyone they want – through social networks. Social networking does not only mean Facebook; there are other very successful international sites like LinkedIn, but also local ones like Orkut in Brazil, Baidu in China and Hi5 in Thailand.

• Facebook: you see its name everywhere and hear about it all the time. This is because it is clearly the most successful social network website in the world, and could easily fit within other social media business opportunities such as communication, collective intelligence and collaboration given the breadth of possibilities it offers. Principally though, it is a social networking site that makes it extremely easy to connect with others by just searching for their names. Messages, chatting, photo and video sharing are different ways through which people can connect. As of January 2012, the site had more than 850 million active users: so this is clearly a place you cannot and should not ignore if you want your business to grow.
• Ecademy: this social networking site provides a more business-oriented social network as it allows small and medium enterprises to connect with each other. It provides many features to help businesses interact with one another, and provides a way for businesses to increase their online presence as well.

Example: Cisco has 12 Facebook fan pages dealing with different topics including Cisco Training Academy, support, products and solution. Some of these pages have more than 20,000 fans and create active, frequent discussions – Cisco has thus used Facebook to attract and engage with a wide audience for its products, and has been optimising on this tool by maintaining this relationship through regular discussions.

3. Blogs and micro-blogs:

These are sites where a person can share thoughts and content such as videos, pictures, audios, etc. and get feedback from others. A micro-blog is a much shorter blog characterized by message-like entries. For businesses, blogging can help get feedback on certain products and/or services, but it can also create brand awareness, increase market visibility and improve customer relationship management.

• WordPress: this is one of the most popular free blogging tools available online. Its strong content management system allows users to do more than blogging. It is very easy to use as it allows users to create and edit contents such as blog posts and web pages without any programming language.
• Twitter: this is an example of a micro-blog where users can post entries of a maximum of 140 characters, called ‘tweets’. Twitter makes it possible for users to stay up-to-date with topics and information they are interested in through these real-time tweets. By the end of 2010, the site had more than 175 million registered users and more than 75 million posts every single day – making it the biggest microblogging site in the world.

Example: IBM has more than 1000 of its employees connect to Twitter every day and tweet both internally among each other and externally with their customers – which gives it a great competitive advantage by having a very easy and cost-effective marketing strategy as well as extensive feedback directly from their customers.

4. Virtual worlds:

A virtual world is an online community which inhabits an online world, or virtual world. Users ‘live’ in these worlds in the form of avatars usually and can interact with each other, create objects and conduct activities in this cyberspace. The business value of these virtual worlds is that they involve marketplaces and profit making and display real products from existing companies – which is why businesses should consider them to spread brand awareness and generate leads.

• Second Life: this is the largest user-created 3D community on the internet. Users can create an avatar, explore different places and purchase virtual properties. Text and voice chat is also available to interact with other users.
• Active Worlds: this is a do-it-yourself version of Second Life, where users can create their own characters and build their own worlds, and explore other 3D worlds which other users have created. They can also interact with other users. The key point is your world your rules.

Example: Apple created an online store in Second Life so that users could go there in cyberspace and browse their latest products. Users can not buy these products, but these virtual stores are a great way to promote brand and product awareness.

For more information about Steve Nicholls

To buy the fully copy of The application guide     go to the store

Knowing something in theory is very different from practically experiencing it first-hand. In other words, if you have actually never been on Facebook then you are not really in the best position to start talking about social marketing strategies.

The Problem

The problem is that a lot of CEOs and high-level managers seem to be somewhat apprehensive about using social networking sites. A piece of research published in 2011 on the tech site A View From Silicon Valley hinted at the seriousness of the problem as it found that only 4 out of 100 CEOs had Twitter feeds, and only 9 had semi-active Facebook accounts.

Perhaps they view it as a waste of time, or perhaps they are just scared of a technology that they do not yet fully understand. However, this is definitely the wrong attitude to adopt if you are head of a company and hope to drive your company to success. Social marketing will only grow in importance over the coming years and if you can make full use of it as soon as possible, then you will put your competition at a distinct advantage.

Why Have Your Own Account

Of course, the fact that CEOs do not have personal accounts does not mean that they do not understand the idea of social networking and web 2.0 sites. It does not mean either that their companies are not currently taking advantage of these services to promote their wares.

However, it is still symptomatic of a general aversion to technology and to change, and it certainly does not send the right message. And if you are not using these services on a daily basis – uploading pictures, building groups, creating events and experiencing changes in the application – then you will not have the full understanding that you would if you were using them.

Having a personal account means that you can play with these social utilities in your spare time and learn what these can do. It will keep you up-to-date with any changes as they happen and will give you a positive and powerful image – one which advocates innovation and forward-thinking. Once you start using social networks personally, then you will have a far better chance of applying what you learn to your business strategy.

Getting Started

So how do you get started with social networking in your own time? Well, as the info graphic here shows, there are plenty of places you can start from – whether it is by uploading a video of your dog onto YouTube or find and add a friend on Facebook.

So why not start right now? Or as soon as you get home if you are currently in the office – boldly turn your computer on and set up your first account. Do not worry if you get it wrong and ask your kids for some help. You may even find that you enjoy it…

These are just a very few examples of the many benefits of social media for businesses. Developing a good social media optimization strategy is crucial to leverage competitive advantage in these times of Internet revolution. There are 5 key fields in which social media presents substantial business opportunities and upon which your social media optimisation approach should be based.

1.Visible Market Presence. Social media extends the reach of your company in an unprecedented way by allowing it to access both global and local markets at any time and from anywhere. In turn, by accessing and interacting in these, companies can develop a strong market presence and gain competitive advantage over their competitors as a result. By playing on this aspect of social media effectively, companies will increase their SEO potential and rank high on mega search engines like Google, which should be the priority of all those companies looking to grow from their website. A virtuous circle is then built: better SEO results reinforce market visibility, which then creates a bigger market, which in turn improves SEO even more and so on and so forth.

2.Communication. Social media opens very wide avenues for communication. It allows communication both within an organisation and between an organisation and other parties of a business by, first, making it possible to communicate even if two parties are countries apart, and second, by allowing communication to take place in different ways through different mediums. YouTube, for instance, is a huge video-sharing website with apparently more than two million views every single day. YouTube can be used, by companies, to create their own YouTube channel for their business. Skype, on the other hand, allows another kind of communication by making it possible to set up live video calls, among other features, between two or more users. Skype is in fact one of the most common means of communication used by businesses.

3.Communities. Social media both gives access and allows the creation of a range of communities. Communities are hubs where people interact with each other on topics that they share interest in. A topic can be on absolutely anything, which means communities are plentiful and very diverse. The offline equivalent to those communities would be clubs, but applied online, clubs have the potential to include many more members across geographical limits. Twitter, for instance, is a micro-blogging tool through which companies can turn a huge pool of users into followers by sending and receiving short, regular daily feeds about product news, feedback, advice and a range of other subjects. Facebook is a very popular social networking tool through which businesses can create a solid community of supporters and customers with a Facebook Fan Page for instance.

4.Collecitve Intelligence. As more and more people interact with each other on a certain topic, more quality information is shared. Also, because social media has access to virtually anyone and at all times, this means that information being exchanged is very likely to be broad and diverse, compared to information being exchanged between a few people from the same town having dinner for example. This translates into great opportunities for companies as they are, too, able to participate in these discussions, or simply able to take useful information from these online conversations. Wikipedia is perhaps the flagship example of collective intelligence: users contribute to the writing of high quality material about millions of topics, and accessible to all. Another example is Amazon’s recommendation system whereby users can recommend a certain product over another, which means that popular and unpopular choices can be found easily.

5.Collaboration. Working jointly on a project is what collaboration is, and social media increases its potential tremendously. It is very important for a company that is made of different parts in different countries, but also for someone who is looking for the right person to complete a certain task rather than just the ‘easy person’ because he or she works in the same building. For instance, huge freelance platforms exist such as Elance or Fiverr to help you find the ideal person to do the job. Diverse and more effective partnerships can be created in this way, which means companies can increase productivity substantially. Zoho is another collaboration site that provides a range of useful applications for businesses including invoicing, information management, web conferencing and project management tools. What’s more is that mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad or BlackBerry facilitate collaboration by allowing it to happen on the move.

One giant amongst social networking sites is Twitter. The site allows people to send short content of 140 characters maximum, on anything they would like to share.

Twitter exemplifies what is called microblogging due to the form this content takes – very short, few sentences, message-like – which is why they are called ‘tweets’. In fact, twitter is commonly known as ‘the SMS of the Internet,’ and now you know why. In 2011, the site had 300 million users – this is 4 times the population of the United Kingdom – and more than 300 million tweets were made every single day.

Twitter was created in 2006, in the USA, in English. Today, it is available in 28 languages. The very latest ones launched were Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu – all created in March 2012.  The big question is: why bother? Why go through all the technical difficulties of setting up new languages – and mind you, these presented a big challenge for the company’s engineers as they had to build new tools to combine both right-to-left and left-to-right languages – when Twitter has already 300 million users, probably even more by now.

What is even more interesting is that 13,000 volunteers helped twitter translate its site into these new four languages. This alone shows how powerful the demand for the site is. This is precisely the answer to why bother: demand is way too high to ignore it. And as a result of this initiative, even more people will be able to use twitter. It is worth noting here that Arabic is spoken in a total of 22 countries, so just by adding one language; Twitter will have the potential to reach an additional 340 million people. Looking at it not just in terms of numbers but in terms of width: twitter is becoming an international phenomenon, available and accessible to different peoples on different continents – and this truly reflects how powerful it has come to be.

Just imagine what this could mean if your business were able to connect with just 1% of the twitter community. Blocking the site for political reasons has proven how powerful it can be. Indeed, several countries have banned it, seeing it as a ‘threat’ because of the voice it can give to people – Iran, for instance blocked the site in 2009 before the presidential elections and Egypt banned it at the time of the 2011 protests.

These are just examples to show how twitter is becoming more of a significant tool and businesses could use it to create their own voices. In fact, some businesses provide excellent illustrations on how to use it successfully: Cisco, for instance, has several twitter accounts for different aspects of its company: for its top executives but also its products and its solutions. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer, has 1,390,000 twitter followers – this is a brilliant example on how to use twitter to create a very strong online presence for your business.

Annabelle Sreberny, professor of global media and communications at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, explained that making twitter available in different languages will help the site become more influential. So what is happening here is that a symbiotic relationship is created between Twitter and its users: the more Twitter grows, the more people can use it, and again the more Twitter grows. Twitter is without a doubt a social media tool which only keeps strengthening, so competitive advantage will come from adopting it at the earliest stage possible.

A great example of collaboration:

Twitter is a great example of how increasingly prevailing social media is becoming. But this Twitter language story is also a very good example of a core business opportunity offered by social media: collaboration. Twitter translated its site in four completely new languages at almost no cost and at a very fast pace.

This was possible because 13,000 volunteers offered to help through Twitter’s Translation Center. In a huge international joint effort, they translated the site’s menu options and support pages into all these languages. As twitter says: ‘thirteen thousand volunteers around the globe immediately got to work, translating and localizing Twitter.com into these languages in record time. Thanks to their contributions, Twitter is now available in right-to-left languages.’

Twitter further explained how diverse these volunteers were and gives a few example of who participated in this international project, including ‘a Saudi blogger, Egyptian college students, a journalist at the BBC, IT professionals in Iran and Pakistan, an Israeli schoolteacher, the co-founders of the grassroots #LetsTweetInArabic campaign, academics specialising in linguistics, and teenagers in Lebanon.’ Not only was there diversity however, but also audacity. Twitter said that some of these volunteers live in areas where Twitter is officially blocked and that ‘their efforts speak volumes about the lengths people will go to make Twitter accessible and understandable for their communities.’

This international collaboration has helped make right-to-left languages on twitter possible in a very quick period of time. Again, this experience has shown how far people are willing to go – breaking legal barriers, introducing new social concepts, devoting time and offering specific skills – to strengthen social media.

Communication: social media offers enhanced internal and/or external communication through the following tools:

• Meetings and conferencing: the act of having actual meetings and conferences online, which can take place in a group of any size. This means that you can virtually meet up with several colleagues to discuss a project for instance, but also that you can attend a lecture or training session from your own home. Social media has completely dissolved physical boundaries, which translates into immense advantages for businesses.
• Sharing media: the sharing of all kinds of content including documents, videos, audios, pictures, presentations slides, etc. This sharing of information can be between specific people only, or with all users of a given site. This not only means that companies can share content easily, but also that they can share it with those they want to, such as their customers or clients. This is a very effective way for companies to promote their. business
• Location services: creating and finding information related to a specific location. These tools basically collect all data (infrastructure, people, events) based on a particular locality and make them available to a pool of users, whose knowledge of that specific place becomes much more extensive as a result. This mean a business can communicate information to a large base of ‘locals’ and attract customers.
• Broadcasting: these tools give the chance to watch, see or listen to an event as it is happening. This means customers get live, real-time information. This is very important for those businesses working around time-sensitive issues as well as for those wishing to communicate live with customers.

Communities: social media allows access to groups or communities where key players like customers, suppliers or competitors can be found, through the following tools:

• Marketplaces: these are social media platforms where some kind of e-commerce is taking place, i.e., the buying and selling of a range of goods and/or services between the users of the site. Entering marketplaces allows companies to reach a very large pool of potential customers, as well as create traffic towards their own websites.
• Social networks: from a business perspective, these offer excellent arenas to reach specific types of people – such as customers, suppliers or clients – and engage with them. Also, social networks give very good opportunities for businesses to spread brand awareness through these communities.
• Blogs and micro-blogs: these are very useful to create communities around a certain topic, product or organisation. Micro-blogs are much shorter blogs, as for example simple entries. Blogging offers many business opportunities: it creates brand awareness, increases market visibility, attracts traffic, improves customer relationship management and finally, allows you to get insight into your customers
• Virtual worlds: this might probably come to you as a surprise, but virtual words – online communities where users interact and create/do things in cyberspace – do have a place in business. As virtual worlds use and display real products from existing companies, businesses can spread brand awareness within huge online communities.

Collaboration: social media gives easy, efficient and often cost-effective ways to help different players work jointly or participate in a project, through he following tools:

• Freelance platforms: outsourcing jobs and tasks has been made very accessible by social media. You can reach all kinds of freelancers, from writers to arbitrators, from general skills to highly specific ones, from very affordable prices to much more expensive ones and from local to global freelancers. The point is the choices are there, which means you can find the ideal freelancer suiting your exact needs.
• Project & Team: social media makes a range of applications used at the office available on the web – which means they can be used anywhere, anytime. From online document management systems to mobile phones, a range of applications and devices allow more effective collaboration regardless of physical boundaries.
• DIY Wiki Platforms: do it yourself wiki platforms, i.e., internal company wikis. These are user-generated information allowing the sharing of spreadsheets, articles and RSS feeds among many other types of information. This facilitates information-sharing and project management, making it much easier and more efficient to work together.
• DIY social networks: do it yourself social networks have the same concept as DIY Wiki Platforms theoretically, but applied to social networks. Companies can have their very own social network and you can just imagine what this means in terms of collaboration. This also means they don’t have to use external, mainstream sites to collaborate if they prefer not to.

Collective intelligence: social media allows the collection and gathering of useful information for businesses, through the following tools:

• Discussion sites: sites whereby users generate specific types of content such as reviews, ratings or answers to questions about a particular service or product. This not only means that you can gather information on what customers like or dislike, but that you can also participate in questions/answers and develop an image of expertise in your field, while creating brand awareness.
• Wikis: these are platforms where users from all over the world can create content. This means that companies can get very easy access to relevant information, but also publish relevant information about them as well, reaching a very wide audience by doing so.
• Ideas platforms: these social media tools allow different people – from different backgrounds, countries, ages, etc – to come together and brainstorm about different ideas in order to come up with solutions to business problems. Ideas platforms are highly valuable and cost-effective solutions for companies facing business challenges.
• Market intelligence: these social media tools allows companies to get a better understanding of the environment in which they are operating and competing, through information like such as demographics, population data, consumption levels. Instead of developing expensive in-house market intelligence tools, companies can use social media applications which already gather and provide this kind of information.

To purchase the Social Media Application Guide:   http://socialmediainbusiness.com/store/applications-guide

1. It is the same as social network. Social networking websites – the flagship being Facebook – are just a tiny part of social media. Anything that allows you to create and share content, and not just view it, is social media. To give you a very few examples, Epinions gather reviews of products across a wide range of industries. The eBay auction site is a marketplace where companies and individuals sell a wide range of goods. Wikinews is a platform of news articles and each article is written by several authors collaboratively. BrainRack connects companies with students by engaging the latter in finding solutions to company problems and projects.

2. It is leisure. Yes it can be, but games and entertainment applications are only a very small part of social media. For instance, blogs can be used by companies to communicate directly with their customers and elicit feedback from them. LinkedIn helps managers get into CEO hubs and interact with useful business connections. Yahoo! Answers gives the chance to get an answer from anyone when a troubling question enters one’s mind. Facebook allows you to gather a strong tail of followers for a demonstration. From social revolution to collaborating on a project, social media opens many different doors.

3. It is simple. Social media might be easy because of its user-friendliness, but embracing it is far from being simple. The amount and depth of information relating to social media is overwhelming – you not only need to understand what’s out there and the vast differences between each application but also the multitude of ways available to use each social media application. Also, there is a huge difference between using Facebook and bringing the right aspects of social media into the DNA of your company. The larger the company is, the more useful social media becomes, but also the more complex the task of bringing it in successfully.

4. It is free. No, it’s not. Time is the key resource. Directly related to the previous point, social media is an overwhelming platform of different applications which means there’s much to learn, much to use and much to maintain. Time to understand this phenomenon and its practical meanings, time for developing the right way of using social media through the right mediums, time to develop an ongoing successful strategy, time to maintain this strategy successfully and, last but not least, time to capture all innovations as social media evolves.

5. It is not important. Well, think again. Look around and notice how many people are using Internet on their Smartphone to log on to Facebook. Read around and pay attention to how many times you come across social media buzz like Facebook-Google war, the government’s role of in Internet regulation or Facebook’s IPO. Browse websites of mega-organizations like The Times, Cisco or Accenture: they all have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and much more. This is because social media open doors into enormous markets. There are 850 million Facebook users; just imagine what kind of business opportunities you will get if you connect with only 0.1% of those. There are 150 million business people on LinkedIn, and this includes the CEOs of the 500 top companies in the world. Markets like these simply cannot be ignored so if you are one of those resistant ones: my urgent advice is, although it is hard to change, embrace social media as soon as possible before you find yourself lagging too far behind.

6. It does not deal with B2B. What you see everywhere is social media being used for the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) industry. Social media has enough to give for everyone and B2B companies can make great use of it to increase their competitive advantage. Salesforce.com, for example, uses YouTube videos to train customers on their complex product offering and this has proven to be worth 750 of their sales representatives. Another example is Cisco which uses competitions to encourage people from around the world to come up with billion-dollar ideas to their business. There are many ways B2B can use social media and the key is to choose the optimal blend of social media applications to answer your business goals.

Steve Nicholls will be speaking on the Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media in Business at 15:00 on Wednesday the 21^st of March. A number of key issues make social media a challenging subject for organizations and managers. The larger the project, the more important and influential these areas become. Social Media in Business briefing will cover:

• Some of the social media opportunities available to your organisation and projects.

• The potential risks and impact of social media on your organisation in a broader strategic sense.

• An overwhelming amount of information demands a framework for easier comprehension of the social media applications and tools for business.

• Understand the visible and invisible impacts on the organisation

• A requirement for a systematic framework for implementation – The 3-Core Project Success System

The trade show will host leading exhibiting organisations and 40 high quality presentations. As the show explains, this “unmissable event provides an unparalleled opportunity to learn from leading industry experts. You will get right up to date with the latest tools, solutions and services at the UK’s biggest and most important project event.”

Information about Project Challenge:

website: http://www.projchallenge.com/case_studies_expertise.cfm

opening times: 21^st of March: 09:30 to 17:00 and 22^nd of March 09:30 to 16:15

Location: Olympia Exhibition Centre

Douglas Fraser has been logging on to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a new Scottish social media site, to find out what it all means for business. A way for staff to waste office time sharing inane chatter with their chums? Or a radical transformation of the way the economy works, and one you can’t afford to ignore?

Nicholls’s contribution to the program explains how companies should fear social media – not because it seems complicated to incorporate it in the business realm, but because by not incorporating it, companies can be left behind very quickly as the internet revolution strengthens. In this interview, you will find out:

• Four key ways through which social media can enhance your business – communication, communities, collaboration and collective intelligence.

• The cost-effective marketing opportunities that certain social media applications offer, such as Twitter and Facebook.

• The lesson to take from the highly successful Groupon example: a company which went from 0 to 12 billion dollars during recession.

“Douglas Fraser brings you the stories and issues making the news in business – from Scotland, the UK, and around the world. Regular interviews with the country’s leading chief executives and in-depth reports on the stories of the week.” BBC Business Scotland

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