Why Embracing Social Media Is Good Business

What is content? Seems like a straightforward question. Years ago, in the world of marketing, it was an easy answer: Ideas, copy, design and production created for specific mediums (web, TV, radio, print materials, photos, videos, design, animation, billboards…you name it.) When it comes right down to it, content was (and still is) everything you use to communicate your brand to your customers.

But today, the job of a CMO is more difficult, because there’s content everywhere. Content you can’t control: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare and more. When we email a link to a friend, it creates content. When we comment on content, we create content. Mention a movie in Twitter and tweets add up to valuable content: a predictor of movie box office results that’s 97.3% accurate. On Facebook, our social graph creates content. On Foursquare our actions create content.

Now is the time to embrace it, strategize for it and welcome its ability to open two-way communication with customers and employees. Social media content is predicted to eventually overtake email as our interpersonal communication of choice. Gartner Inc., predicts, “By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.”

As we move forward, many companies will actually look to build their own social networking platforms, or at least take greater advantage of existing sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Face it, your brand is living and breathing on social media sites whether you’re involved in the conversation or not. It’s better to be engaging with it and learning from it rather than ignoring it.