Toot...toot! All board!
Last week's Social Media Conference NW at Skagit Valley College provided me with a sense of where social media is going and what role businesses are playing in it. The 250 or so attendees could still learn some of the basics about sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but this year's conference also moved on to talk about business strategy, market research and return on investment.
It's now reached a point where businesses are past the "Hi, I'm out here," phase to really learning about their customers through interaction and data. One of the presenters at the conference, Clay McDaniel, showed a variety of free and not-so-free research tools businesses can use to find out what people across Internet are saying about a company, as well as getting a feel about what people think of the brand.
McDaniel, founder of the Seattle-based marketing firm Spring Creek Group, also noted the most important tools of all these days: the brain and Excel spreadsheets. The tools are there, but it still requires thought and numbers to learn the answers.
Presenters were also showing how social media is becoming a money-making proposition.
Anne-Marie Faiola, who is involved in the soap making industry with her two main Bellingham-based companies, Bramble Berry and Otion, showed how she's able to determine how much money has come into her 25-employee business directly because of social media, as well as project indirect revenue from her blog posts and her Soap Queen "TV" episodes on YouTube.
She can also see the correlation between mentioning a product on a blog post or other use of social media and the impact it has on sales. Overall sales for Faiola's companies in February were up 29 percent year-over-year, right in the midst of this recession.
Social media also helped her continue to use one of her strengths - interacting with people. The company has grown to a point where it's more challenging to regularly check to see what's on customers' minds.
"I missed my customers, and this (social media) has become a way to connect with them again," Faiola said.
By interacting with customers through blogs, Facebook and Twitter, it's also helping her find things they want. One of Bramble Berry's latest soap molds is a soap tractor, an idea she got from one of her customers. It something she said wouldn't have occurred to her.
While companies already involved in social media are taking the next steps in making it a profitable part of the business, the "new frontier" attitude still seems to be in place. Faiola tried out different aspects of social media to see what works for her, and that's continuing today with other local companies.
As social media continues to evolve, it's become an interesting opportunity for companies because it addresses one of the basic tenants of running a successful business: talking to customers. It's a tried-and-true tenant that's being applied with technology.