Helping business to make the most of social media

For American social media and business consultant and educator Mark Schaefer, it really all began with a blog and a tweet.

A blog, because when, after more than a decade, he left his role as an executive with aluminium company Alcoa and decided to start a blog called , he had little idea that it would gain national, then international interest and help launch a new career.

A tweet, because a single post he made to Twitter, picked up and replied to by a man in Wales, set in train a sequence of social and then work events which last week culminated in a client visit with Bank of Ireland and several talks in Ireland, including one to more than a thousand IBM salespeople at a corporate event in Killarney.

“The thing that really ignited my career in social media was my blog. I really started it in 2009 as an experiment, and to immerse myself in blogging,” he says.

He thinks that his blog resonated with readers because many bloggers writing about social media and marketing actually had very little marketing experience.

By contrast, he pushed to get Alcoa online in the 1990s, after he had seen the internet demonstrated. “I suggested to my boss that there might be something in this internet thing. It seemed to have a lot of potential,” he says with amusement.

Struggling

Alcoa became one of the first companies globally with an e-commerce site, which it used to buy and sell commodity products. Schaefer eventually found himself the global director of e-business for Alcoa.

He left Alcoa just as social media was really beginning to take off beyond the realm of blogging. And he quickly found that not only were companies struggling to come to terms with how – and whether – to use social media, but so were universities, which felt the subject needed to be incorporated into marketing programmes, but could not find people who could develop a curriculum or teach it.

Before long, he found himself writing books on social media that have become textbooks for dozens of universities – including one that he says remains the top-selling book on Twitter. And, he helped to develop a course on social media for Rutgers University, where he also teaches.

Why do businesses have such a difficult time with social media?

“It’s so complex. Things like Twitter require an entirely new mindset. What businesses have a hard time with is that every time there is a new technology businesses treat it as an old technology.”

Hence, most businesses initially saw the internet as a place to stick up their brochures, when it is really a new form of mass broadcasting, he says.

“The common mistake of companies is to use social media just as another advertising channel, when what most people are using social media for is to get away from that. They don’t go to Facebook to look at more advertisements, they go to Facebook to play Farmville.”

He argues that many organisations miss a simple truth – that the internet actually restores an older way of doing business, where there is more direct communication. Consumers want – and expect to be able – to talk with somebody in a company through social media. They do not want to be advertised at.

“But a lot of business executives are freaked out, because they’re conditioned to advertise. With social media, the customers talk back. As someone said, ‘It’s like the deer having guns’! But we’re going back to the way we always did things in the past.”

One problem many companies have is that they want to jump into using social media too quickly. Schaefer works with companies to think about the way in which they are different from others – to pinpoint what makes them unique. That, he says, is what they will want to focus on in their social media presence.

He sees three big changes emerging right now that are connected to the use of social media.

“The first is personal empowerment, where everyone has a voice. Influence used to be determined by the power you had, your job title or your education. Those things don’t matter on the internet. Influence has been democratised,” he says.

Secondly, he sees a major change coming with the combination of social media and mobile networks. “Mobile has lowered the barriers to publication,” he notes, and that means even more democratisation of communication and opportunity.

Augmented reality

“In the US and Europe, about 30 per cent of people say smartphones are their first screens of access to the internet. In countries like Egypt, the number rises closer to 70 per cent,” he says.

And third, he says the next big wave will be augmented reality – the ability to overlay information drawn from the internet seamlessly into our everyday environment. Google Glass, a “digital layer” of information that can be placed onto a transparent surface, is supposed to be publicly available some time this year, he notes.

“Those kinds of developments in augmented reality mean the internet will surround us like the air that we breathe.”

Later in the day at the Institute of International and European Affairs (IEAA) in Dublin, he talks about the unique role the internet is beginning to play in developing the concept of influence.

He stresses again to his audience that influence is no longer about who or what you are, gauged by your external titles or achievements. It’s all about your ability to move content across the internet – to make a blog post that many comment on and spread to other readers; to have a tweet re- tweeted; or a Facebook post linked to.

“Content that moves through a network is a legitimate source of power unique to the internet,” he says. Services that can measure the ability of individuals or companies to move content, and how it is viewed– such as Klout and PeerIndex – bring fascinating insights into who the new powerbrokers are, he argues.

This will enable organisations to design more meaningful and productive social media campaigns, amongst other things, around this new ROI or “return on influence”, he says .

Ironically, this flow of content, often for free, and this new democracy of influence has meant Schaefer has himself had to rethink work and career. He acknowledges that social media enables a highly disruptive new world in which many of us will have to find new ways to compete and thrive.

Often, he says, that will be through what he calls “adjacencies”. He says his career is built about his peripheral “adjacent” activities, such as speaking engagements, book sales and consultancy work, that his free work, the blogging and tweeting, enables.

“I give away my content, but I have to build my life through adjacencies,” he quips. But as he posted his 1,000th blog post this week on , it’s clear he isn’t complaining.