Get Social Media Started - New Lands, Pioneers, New Business Models

FaceBook is a simple social network for everyone. Restaurants in New York City, Tel Aviv and Milan are more effective selling their menus on FaceBook than phone books (Yellow Pages) and travel guide books (Fromer's, Michelin) Good for restaurateurs bad for books: ARE YOU A TRAVEL GUIDE BOOK BUSINESS MANAGER?

Getting social media started at a company can be the best strategy to motivate managers and staff. Organizations sometimes have a difficult time getting started on a new idea quickly. Managers and workers get stuck doing something the old way, they need guidance on how to move to new lands. There are so many questions and concerns that learning logically is not a practical method. Sometimes as the Nike slogan goes, you need to "JUST DO IT". But what if you want to test the organization's ability to run a social network or write a blog, or even test how quickly you can write articles or work with another department? Even though writing is easy for some managers, the shift from highly polished, regularly scheduled communication to steady stream of quick off-the-cuff messages may not build momentum. Or worst, you may fail temporarily and turn off the people who just want to fall back into the old way of doing things. What do you do?

There are several ways to think of social media. This will help you understand and explain the shift to everyone in the organization. Understanding how the "new world" works, building new skills, guidance and strategy from management and examples from successful operations are simple techniques. Here are some points which explain how things work. I look at the main differences between social networking media and traditional media. Keep the differences on everyone's mind. People remember and act on a few key points. If you see five differences keep one or two as the important one for your company. Guide and motivate everyone to learn how social media works. There are many ways to learn how something works: examples, analysis, detail understanding, detail observation, etc. If your organization and the staff has not gone through a major shift in thinking in the past this is an opportunity to do so. Here are a few points that characterize the shift in social media to get you started:

A New Communication Channel: narrower, faster, connected, unedited...

Social media is a new communication channel. Paper based professional literature, domain specialty magazines, static web sites are formatted as a page, chapter, book, magazine... Social media is formatted as a message, stream, channel format. This is a crucial shift in format. The change in format affects how the messages are received and what needs to be said.

A New Format: short messages, serializing, commenting, interaction...

Messages, even complex ones, are broken into very short segments. The 140 character cell phone SMS format is now how twitter works and is used by many as a standard. On social network message boards like FaceBook people usually read just the headlines. Short messages stream before our eyes, so you need to segment what you want to say. Seth Godin's blog and Jakob Nielsen's AlertBox newsletter are great examples of how to segment ideas into small pieces.

A New Business Model: open source, collaboration, open communication...

There is a movement to open all information. The movement to give everything for free is crucial to understand. That does not mean giving services or product for free. Exactly the opposite. Think of a lawyer that helps you with a law suite. The law itself and the case law is "open" and free. You just have to go to the library and read it. But the advice and his experience is highly valuable. Tim O'Reilly's Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution is a great book on how software took the first step in decades toward open information and communication. Adapt your information and communication to an open format.

A New Frontier: many unsettled territories, abandoned sites, pioneers...

The movement to change business communication and interaction is still very new. This should not be the reason why you are not doing it yet. If your competitor or partner is not doing it yet, you are just lucky. If you do not see enough relevant examples in your town or state, look somewhere else. New frontiers with the Internet as a technology move very quickly. This is happening all the time, everywhere ~ get going quickly.

Do Not Fear New Skills: writing, editing, connecting, programming...

Every time communication takes us to the next phase there is a shift in skills. The amount and quality of writing is pushing us all to be better writers, photographers, audio readers, video directors, editors and gatherers of information... the list goes on and on. Until social networking sites were accepted, networking was considered somewhere between an art and a personal attribute, the gift of the gab. Today we have the tools so everyone can do it. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and the Tipping Point are books about networking before FaceBook and Twitter.

Get help, seek advice, learn and try out, don't feel overwhelmed...

Just like any technology and business revolution, most people can not do it alone. In every technology shift freelancers, advisers, coaches and implementers offer help. If you can't do a blog by yourself, get someone to design and write. If you do not understand a social network, hire a young networker to do it for you. Learning and planning and thinking is not enough. You need to get going and do it fast.