Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online

Chapter 50. Social Media—Talk Is Cheap for Businesses

There's lots of talk about social media. Tons. The echo is nearly deafening at this point. Freedom. Openness. We have powerful tools to communicate. We are the media. It's all about the conversation. We talk about this all the time. At the same time, more people are just starting to get into this, so it's all new and exciting and fresh again. Businesses are starting to ask, "Hey, is there something here, or is this just another billable item, like when we used to pay for someone to build brochureware for us?" Businesses are asking how this stuff all threads into their world, their terms. They're asking how we're going to change their bottom line, deliver something to their top line, make this all worth it.

Do you have an answer for them? Here are some thoughts that lead down the path of helping businesses understand the value proposition.

Collaboration Tools—Internal

Things like blogs, podcasting, Utterli, Twitter, wikis, and more unified tools such as JiveSoftware and BaseCamp^[191] are useful for internal processes and collaboration. I believe they are better than the tools most enterprises uses to communicate about a project. I believe the implementation of such tools is simple, requires little or no infrastructure (depending on security requirements), and most often can be cloud-operated, depending on comfort levels. These can be used in a number of ways:

• Status messaging

• Informational training

• Project management

• Knowledge management ...