Guest Blog: Mike Saxby, Group Publisher, PHONE+ & Channel Partners
If you look around, you can’t help but notice that there is a social disease spreading at a pretty good clip. No need to alert the CDC or anything – this spreading addiction to social media is a good sickness to have in the world of relationship building.
Over at PHONE+, we have been working over the past few years to continue to build our online presence and e-newsletters. We have embraced social media in various forms, including the launch of the Channel Partners Network group on LinkedIn, where we now have more than 700 members, many of whom are active in the discussions on a regular basis. And when I see even more people taking the social networking bull by the horns, I am continually encouraged that we are all doing the right thing. For instance, Bill’s blog has seen great success on the PHONE+ Web site, and I have no doubt he will continue to garner a following with this new forum.
So, if the Internet has seen widespread public use for almost two decades, why is there so much talk about utilizing social media for business purposes now?
It’s almost as if personal applications and business applications have been on a path toward each other for quite some time, and now they’ve started to mingle a bit with each other on the bridge to the other side. People went from using the new-fangled chat function long into the night to keep up with friends on the other side of the country; and now, we use instant messaging every day in the workplace for quick communication across the hall or across the world. Twenty years ago, business advisers were encouraging entrepreneurs and enterprises to start a Web site and to be sure to put their e-mail addresses on their business cards. Today, a business might be advised to start a LinkedIn group, a Facebook or Twitter account, or even to utilize YouTube to dispense a message. And with huge companies like Google continuing to make a paradigm shift from consumer apps to business functionality – and using the channel to do so – the lines defining which Web tools are personal and which are business-related are blurring more each day.
The growing acceptance of social networking in the workplace also is no doubt influenced by the current state of the nation, and for that matter, the world. America’s recession-like economy has inspired innovation in many lines of business … marketing not excluded. Reaching a target audience via social media can be very effective, not to mention free of charge or relatively inexpensive.
And we can’t deny the effects of the environmentalism movement either. Companies are saving money AND reducing their carbon footprints by utilizing Web communication tools in business. Furthermore, social media is eco-friendly in that it doesn’t use the staggering amounts of paper and materials that, say, a direct marketing campaign would use.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear the time for social media is now. The networking aspects inherent in this phenomenon are very attractive to channel partners; and therefore, I expect the use of social media to be ubiquitous for successful partners in the next year or two. One thing the CDC would indeed say about social networking and social media – the conditions are now optimal for it to spread at a rapid pace.
