Making Social Media Work for Business

Social media doesn’t work as a mass public early detection and warning system, for anything, from potentially disastrous, to potentially profitable; information is neither reliable nor guaranteed. The Emergency Alert System, for example, isn’t “on” anything, it “interrupts” things. That’s how you know it’s for real. That’s how you know fact from opinion.

Social media is mass “public” discovery and communication, so fine if you want to search and/or manage your personal relationships and/or social graph this way; we’ll call this “RM,” short for relationship management. Social media can also work for CRM and for what we like to call pre-research, or presearch. Presearch is simply investigation before hard research, sort of like micro-blogging is to blogging.

CRM is a bit more complicated than personal RM. If a business comes across a social site where it sees or was alerted to conversation about it (we’d like to call this investigation stage brand management), the company can then decide if it’s right to jump in. But don’t sell anything.

The Big Deal

The big deal about mixing social media and business comes down to 2 words: advertise and discover. It’s that simple.

Businesses must advertise; they want and need leads, prospects, customers, clients. They need to get the word out. Consumers need get the word out too. They need to discover; they need things. The $64,000 question-du-jour is how to use social media to find consumers and businesses.

Here’s where the mixing comes in. But the mixing isn’t quite that simple.

Don’t expect to sell anything to your direct contacts in social networks. It’s fine to offer something of value to your network. It’s also fine to hope that some of your contacts will promote your offerings to their networks and potentially generate a ripple or viral effect.

Here’s the big deal: The problem is overload. Information Overload. Search Overload. Attention Overload. Advertising Overload. Media Overload. Everything Overload.

But social is just what it says, social. P2P. C2C. It’s where potential customers congregate. But it’s also where C2C can become C2B and B2C. This, other than CRM, is the only reason businesses come to social media. If we don’t want businesses invading, let’s give them a reason not to: Don’t search. Don’t advertise. Inverse search.

Traditional search is a pain in the ass; it’s one to one-at-a-time. Inverse search is one-to-many.

To your left is a social search map. To your right, an inverse search map.

Using InverSearch completely negates the need to search, blog, advertise or tweet. But if you’ve got nothing better to do, then go right ahead. If you’ve already sent a query via inverse search, your important messages and needful things are privately conveyed in the most efficient and effective manner. Congratulations! You now have more free time.

Some might argue that information is neither reliable nor guaranteed with inverse search. Let’s see. When a consumer sends an inquiry via inverse search, it is not guaranteed to be reliable, but then again businesses aren’t obligated to respond to your inquiries either. So why would anyone waste their time sending a bogus query?

Some might wish to contest the fact that responses from businesses are relevant, reliable. Why would a business pay to send you anything but?

Here’s a way to clean up things. Businesses don’t need to present to audiences; they don’t need to advertise. Consumers can let them know when they’re ready to move on something.

Two Questions:

1. If you’re a business, wouldn’t you rather hear directly from consumers, without advertising?

2. As consumers, wouldn’t you like to get rid of the spam once and for all, and get what you need, without searching? Wouldn’t we all be better off if we got what we needed straight from the horse’s mouth?