Great answer. Every business has phones. The have had a form of communication since the dawn of time. Be it a pteranodon with a bone attached to its leg( A favorite  Super Bowl FedEx commercial of mine) to today’s instant communication and e-commerce. There has been no question as to the value of communications to a company. The question becomes in how do you optimize the channels that we use to communicate.

Are we communicating our companies goals and objectives? Are we listening to our customers needs and concerns? Are we listening to what the competitors are doing and saying and do we care?

As we have stated many times in our workshops, one on one consultations, and blog post’s not every channel is needed by every business out there. Not all business’s need a staff of 5 to 100 people dedicated to online social platforms to communicate their business to potential customers. But it is needed. Ask yourself how much business would you not do if you had no phones?

 NOW how much business have you lost not utilizing the many free online tools out there to reach your customers and future customers. What is the ROI on silence or absence of your company online?

Only you can answer these questions, but if you need some ideas or help we are here for you.

We here at Smmee have spoke in the past of the future of the Internet going from saturation to localization. Myspace preceded by Second Life has experienced this last year and is trying to re invent itself. Virtual worlds like Habbo.com and social media platforms like Ning.com have entrenched themselves in their niches and have been successful. Disney is embracing social media and virtual worlds to the point where it is re modeling their theme parks to incorporate it. But where does the future lay?

I believe it will lay in localization. Where users will play online in smaller fields of social media that revolve around who they are in the real world. They will spend far more time in forums that arouse their interests, loves and beliefs. We still see Facebook being the giant whitepages in the sky but it can only grow so far. So taking that in mind take a look at this great article  from I wanna Express with User generated content stats and forecasts and see where you can best put your companies brand online.

What Is Social Media?

I was browsing through my RSS reader today and came across an interesting post from Brian Clark, titled Since When Are Blogs Not Social Media?. Here is a quote from it:

I’ve noticed a strange trend lately.

For some reason, people seem to be equating social media with social networking.

At the same time, they seem to be treating blogging as something other than social media.

I found his post interesting because that trend is something I have been noticing myself. It looks like for many people social media is the collection of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

Well, it is much more than that.

Social media are the various forms of user generated content and the collection of websites and applications that enables people to interact and share information online.

Complicated? Well here is a list of things that are part of the social media:

• online forums (e.g., DigitalPoint)
• blogs (e.g., WordPress)
• social networking sites (e.g., Facebook)
• social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg)
• video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube)
• photo sharing sites (e.g. Flickr)
• streaming sites (e.g., Ustream)
• user reviews (e.g., Amazon)
• crowdsourcing (e.g., Wikipedia)
• content aggregators (e.g., FriendFeed)

As you can see, social media is much wider than what some people think. It is also much older. We could say that the first Usenet (a form of distributed discussion system) developed in 1980 was already social media.

Just got back from the Login conference hosted here in sunny (okay rainy) Seattle. One of the interesting round table debates was on forums. The debate in questions was should there be official company forums around ones game or leave that to third parties and or fans? One of the many interesting topics that came up was overall cost of hosting a forum as well as the feedback it generated. Apparently fan based or third part forums were usually self moderated while larger ones were moderated by the sites volunteers or paid staff. The third party/fan based forums usually had more positive feedback and support for the games they were based on while the company based forums were more negative. Now guerrilla based negative comments really haven’t made it into these forums yet (but it has been hinted at) and game companies are generally the tip of the spear in new tech on a social level so that was great to hear.

However the discussion came down to a general conclusion that the game companies (even the giants like WOW,LOTR and Startrekonline) need both company sponsored forums and fan based forums. For mainly TWO reasons.:

1: Customers service is number one(without fans to play the game why exist) and they need to have a way to reach the company and forums are a great way to do this. Twitter and blogs don’t have the same impact.

2: Fan based forums are necessary to see what fans are doing amongst themselves and a great way to have research and development done for you outside your company(no cost as the fans are doing it themselves) and a cost effective way to release information about upcoming products and reward fans with sneak peaks.

Now you may not be a game company but forums can do the same for you. Provide effective communication to your customers on your products and service as well as allowing your customers to comment on your products and services and say things they might not tell you face to face that you need to know.