Is your business REALLY ready for social media?

To quote Sandy Carter, Vice President of Social Business Evangelism at IBM, “Culture eats strategy for lunch!”   

If your business is not ready to share information internally or hear some not-so-wonderful messages from your customers, then all your best laid social marketing plans may just come to naught.

You don’t have to look too far to find examples of brands that have removed customer comments from their Facebook pages or shutdown campaigns all together because they haven’t received the answers they wanted or expected.  

Marketers often bemoan the fact that they’re finding it difficult to get their colleagues and managers to “buy in” to social media and as we all know, it’s impossible to run an effective SM program if the marketing team are the only people driving things forward. Everyone needs to be involved in some way.

So before you embark on planning a knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark social media strategy, do yourself a favour and analyze your company’s culture.   What is the speed of your decision making process and who are the people allowed to make the decisions?  Social media isn’t going to wait around while your board of directors create that perfectly crafted answer – you’ll need to act fast and with decisiveness. 

Sandy shared a sample of IBM’s culture checklist on her blog yesterday :

Some particularly important areas to note are:

Learning – are employees and managers willing and enthusiastic to learn new skills or are they trying to avoid having to step into the unknown?  It can be especially difficult to get older generations of employees involved in SM because they don’t understand how it works and are loath to invest the time to do so.

Horizontal Communications – are you able to pick up the phone and ask that guy in the stock room whether they have a bath towel in all three colours or do you have to send a memo to his manager first?  Is Information shared freely through easily accessible channels or do you have to fill out a form to request an update on a customer complaint?

Boundaries – are employees and managers able to operate and make suggestions outside of their fields of expertise or are your R&D meetings for the R&D team alone?  Marketers and customer service staff are often able to offer extremely valuable ideas about other areas of operation, but are they willing to listen? Or is it a case of “you do your job and I’ll do mine”?

Taking the time to analyze and understand your company’s culture – and taking steps to change it if needs be – is the first step in ensuring an enduringly successful social media strategy.

You can follow Sandy Carters blog at www.socialbusinesssandy.com and get yourself a copy of her book, GET BOLD - Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business, here.

How to register your company's website domain name

I was more than a little annoyed to discover that a friend of mine who is a small business owner recently paid a “web developer” R600.00 ($75 or £45) to register his business’s domain online – that’s EXCLUDING the hosting company’s domain registration fee. Ludicrous! R600.00 for something that probably took the developer about 5 minutes to do. This small business owner could easily have done it himself had he not been totally intimidated by the task.

So in the interests of saving you a few bucks, here’s a quick guide to registering a domain name. But first a few definitions :

ISP – Your Internet service provider i.e. the company that provides you with your Internet access. In South Africa that could be MWEB, WebAfrica, Polka, Telkom, ect. Your ISP does not have to be the same as the company who hosts your webpage.

Hosting - In order for people all over the world to access your website at any time they want to, it has to be kept somewhere – this is where your hosting company comes in. They keep your webpage on their server and make sure it’s available when its URL (www.myfabulousbusiness) is entered into a web browser.

Domain Name – that’s basically the name (or address) of your webpage e.g. wehavesmellysocks.co.za - “.co.za” is a country code Top Level Domain and “wehavesmellysocks” is a second level domain. (.com is a is generic Top Level Domain.)

Subdomains – these are third level domains that help you organise the content on your site. Kind of like subfolders in a big file. You don’t need to register subdomains. You can also use the URL of a subdomain to send visitors directly to a certain page they require.

 Most hosting companies in South Africa charge between R79.00 – R99.00 per annum for a co.za domain name. .Com and .biz are pricier, but there isn’t really any difference between them anyway – these top level domains are used to indicate your geographical location (za is South Africa) or type of organisation (.org is a non-profit.)

The great news is that you can register your domain name as soon as you’ve decided what your business name is (and before someone else snaps it up). You can also “park” it until you are ready to start building your website without paying any hosting charges. Most hosting companies will allow this for free. I have been told that a number of companies frown on this practice because of domain squatting - which is registering a domain name with the hopes of selling it for profit one day when the brand / company whose name you are using, wants to register. Double check this with whichever hosting company you are planning to use.

And even better news is that if you decide that you want to use Company B to host your website after you’ve already registered your domain with Company A – you can simply transfer your domain to the new hosting company.  This will also usually be done free-of-charge.

Now that you know all that stuff, all that remains for you to do is check whether the domain name you want is available.

Simply visit the domain registration site of your choice – we recommed Hetzner or Webafrica – and navigate to the “domain registration” page. Both sites will give you a search bar where  you can check whether the domain you want is available. If it is, great stuff. Enter your billing details and you’re the proud owner of a shiny new domain name!

If not, either consider variations on the name you were hoping for or visit the co.za Domain Administration site here. Enter the domain name in question in the specified area and the site will provide you with the details of the registered owner. You could then contact him/her to find out if they’re willing to sell the domain name to you.

See. Easy-peasy. Here’s hoping we saved you 600 bucks!

What is social media?

If you Google the term social media you’re likely to have come across hundreds of definitions – some of which make sense, some of which don’t.  The one that I’ve found best describes what it is - most succinctly (and in my mind, correctly) - comes from The Social Media Guide  : 

“Social media is user generated content Articles, pictures, videos, sound clips and other media that is posted/uploaded to a website that has been created by the users of that website is called user generated content. Wikipedia, for example, is entirely made up of articles written by users who have sufficient knowledge on the subject they are writing about. It differs from the content published on a business’s website which has usually been written by the business owner, marketing team or web developer. that is shared over the internet via technologies that promote engagement, sharing and collaboration.”

A social media site any website where you to interact with other visitors to the site using different forms of media e.g. picture, video, sound and words. 

Social media websites can be organized into broad categories and we’ll look at those next.