How Social Media Can Transform Any Business

I wrote a lot about how big brands integrated social media into product development and marketing, and our textbook Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies quite exclusively talks about well recognized brands. Instead of focusing on big brands this time I wanted to take some of the main points from the how social media can transform a business and see how those ideas apply into Start-up or a small business.

Small business or a start-ups' success hinges on either recognizing a small target market and build a product/service that connect with the audience (customer centric)  or build a product/ service and understand how it will connect with the people (product centric) like the Google Glass. Either way social media can help. Though in this blog I will focus on how a customer centric organization can be transformed with groundswell and give three things you should consider before taking off with a social media marketing strategy.

1. Listen to what people are saying

Organizations big or small have a lot of benefit in listening to what people are saying about you. The textbook extensively talks  about how Dell, a company that rely on direct sales business model  without a brick-and-mortar presence faced a PR disaster in 2005 when the company failed to listen to what customers are saying about the company on blog space. Your business does not have to be a fortune 500 company, even the Mom and Pap pizza place cannot avoid groundswell. I'm sure you've hear of Yelp. Customer reviews from websites like Yelp have a direct impact. Michael Luca's working paper on how Yelp reviews affect on restaurant revenue found that "A one-star 
increase is associated with a 5.4% increase in revenue."

2. Start Small

Even big names get groundswell wrong. Remember #AskJPM Twitter fiasco. So, it is important to start with one strategy, whether its listening to what people are saying, talking with the customers, energizing the most enthusiastic customers, supporting the customers through social media tools like wikis, Twitter customer support or embracing customers ideas. If you are small business just getting started with social media its best to start with social media site like Facebook where there is a lot of built in support for small businesses. For instance, Facebook's small business Saturdays has over three million followers who are enthusiastic about local businesses. Facebook also have a page that let small businesses share your story, where small business can talk about who they are, what they do and how Facebook helped.

3. Who is the Social Media guru?

Its very easy to let the person who have the most free time to run your organization's social media page. Though that may not be such a great idea. The key to success, Li and Bernoff points out, "taking an idea that typically starts with a few employees who understand groundswell..." Remember your social media page talks to the entire online world. What your FaceBook page, Twitter or any other social media platform say is very important.

So, do you have any experience in running the social media page for a small organization? Can you share what kind of resources you found helpful and what were your biggest challenges?