Idea and Innovation Blog

This is a very interesting question, and one that gets asked in almost every corporation. Most articles I've read, or most advice consultants give to companies, are how to set up Facebook and Twitter pages, and how to monitor them to make sure the public is speaking positively about your brand.

I think this is the wrong approach. First of all, monitoring is a waste of time and budget in my opinion. This is a great article that explains why companies shouldn't invest in social media monitoring: http://socialmediatoday.com/rickmans/149706/why-companies-should-not-invest-online-monitoring

Second of all, a huge issue with this is once you've set up a Facebook/Twitter page, how do you attract customers? How do you keep customers as fans? How do you engage them properly? Of course the answers to these questions will vary depending on the nature of your business, but in general, this is very hard to do, and realistically requires a full-time employee dedicated to this. For a small business with limited resources, this might be tough.

I am a big believer in crowdsourcing and collecting ideas and opinions to generate real answers. Facebook's 500 million members and Twitter's 75 million are a huge pool of resources for companies. Imagine if every issue, every question, every new idea that your company had could be filtered, tested, and built by this crowd. I really think this is where we are heading in terms of social media. I think eventually, companies will be run by the customers, and jobs like marketing manager, and product managers, and outside consultants will not be needed anymore.

I realize this is a bold prediction, but mark my words... in the next 2-3 years, companies will learn how to properly "tap" into social media.