Social Media: Free is Bad for Business

Inside Indiana Business just published an excellent and straight forward article by Amy Zucker called “Social Media is Part of the Marketing Mix“. Amy is President and Founder, Synergy Marketing Group, Inc., an Indiana company. Amy eloquently and succinctly points out the value of using social media for business and also suggests some important strategies that I wholeheartedly agree with.

The part of Amy’s presentation that jumped out at me immediately is her bullet point #1 that encourages a strategic approach to social media rather than a casual one. Unfortunately, social media is very easy to use casually and in the long run, I believe that casual users will find less value in social media than those who plan and strategize their efforts.

21 Means 21, Even Online

As alcohol distributors and retailers, the various states make it our responsibility to make certain that we are not serving or advertising our products to minors. Social media can make it easier for minors to get access to us and us to them, so it is imperative in the short term that we be sure that we are doing our best to target only those aged 21 or older with our social media efforts. If we don’t take care to do that now, we may find ourselves on the outside looking in on the electronic future that our consumers will be living in.

What can you do to to vet or qualify your fans and followers to make sure they meet those requirements?

Facebook is pretty simple. For starters, you’re using a Facebook Page for your business and not a personal profile, correct? If you are not using a Facebook Page you’re already making a mistake that needs to be rectified. Beyond that, Facebook collects a lot of information about its members, including their age, so Facebook knows how old your potential page fans are.

All you need to do is to edit your page settings to make your page visible to only people over the legal drinking age. Facebook makes that easy. Go to Page Edit, then Settings and change your Age Restrictions to “Alcohol-Related”. Facebook will then restrict access to your page and limit access only to people who claim to be of legal drinking age in their country of residence. For the United States, that age is 21.

Embrace Criticism!

Your worst fear is realized: social media (Facebook, Twitter or your blog) has opened the door for someone to be critical of you or your company. If it hasn’t already happened, it will. Probably sooner rather than later. But acting professionally and promptly can turn a disaster into the best positive customer service experience your company can have.

Here’s an example. Nestle has a Facebook page. Nestle is also known to use palm oil in their products. Harvesting palm oil requires cutting down a lot of trees, many of them located in the rainforests that provide us with oxygen and help with climate control. So the Nestle Facebook page became the target of some criticism for this practice. In the end, Nestle made a bad situation worse by responding poorly to the criticism.