I’ve been having an interesting email exchange with someone over the merits of social networking for business, and after quite a bit of back-and-forth, I think the core of the argument is “gimmick vs foundation”.
As in, is this stuff just some quickie, turnkey marketing scheme, or is it a new and essential building block to your online presence?
I fall definitively into the latter opinion, and the analogy I often use is that 10 or 12 years ago, when you heard you needed a website for your business, the response was often, “huh?”
Today, a business without a website is an oddity.
Social networking now sits in that same gray area – luckily some things are starting to mature that paint a clearer picture of why.
The problem is that a lot of the old-school info-marketers have taken to pushing this on people as some kind of “magic pill” to getting new customers in the door immediately.
While this can be true in some cases if done correctly, the applications are different for each type of business.
A restaurant or general-interest retailer could theoretically be driving business in every day just by Tweeting out “come in right now and get x percentage off” types of deals and incentives.
In contrast, a plumber or other type of service that’s less impulse-based is going to benefit from these tools more through building general awareness and things like Social Search, which is (as far as I’m concerned) now an essential part of your overall SEO strategy.
Summing up – if someone is selling you a “Magic Get-More-Business-Today via Twitter” package, run. If someone is laying out a reasoned and logical short and long-term plan and strategy…listen, because they’re right.
By the way, you can follow me on Twitter here. I also am experimenting with Google Buzz, like I talked about the other day – it should have some interesting business applications, but it’s still sorting itself out quite a bit.
