Social Media in Business, Part 1 – The Nasty Side of the Story

In business, social media is either the big favourite or the big “bleah”.

The extraordinary benefits of this new wave come on the lips of:

– startups: most of them run by young people who are using Internet more than soap, water and sometimes even food (I met someone who wanted to start an online business who deeply thought that the future of the Internet business would be the invention of the “food&water” pill which would practically give the benefit of not wasting time with some stupid activities like eating and drinking water)

– small/medium business: as the owners really think that a nice Facebook page and two twitts a day will bring the best in their profits; stop dreaming and start making a plan for your future social media and then maybe you can start hoping

– open minded corporations: small in number though and using more the silent mode of their online social voice

The monster called “social media” appears frightening as hell for:

– large corporations which are mainly scared with the security stuff; by the way, let me tell you a secret: if you want absolutely total security, then stop connecting to Internet at all… start now by closing this blog page :)

– businesses with no actual understanding of the 21 century social phenomenon, which strongly believe in delivering messages to people using pigeons (by the way, pigeons have a Facebook fan page where they accuse some of you of animal unfriendly treatment) ;)

– the so called businesses that uses the perfect stupid line and amuses 3/4 of this world, including a few 7 year old children, and sounds like “we don’t have this because our clients don’t need it… you know, we conducted some very very focused focus groups and we found…”. Please, stop before you die suffocated by the tons of research papers! Don’t insult my intelligence! If your customer is not on the Internet, let me ask you something: what kind of business do you run? Are you selling smashed tomatoes for the future pasta sauce delivered to the Italian mob? Are you in the coffee business using slaves?

Let’s face it! Social media needs a little bit more attention! If you don’t think so, don’t come back for the second part of this post. I’ll give some insights that may ruin all your old great strategies regarding pigeons, tomatoes or coffee beans… or maybe you want to find out the terrible secrets of ”how to hit the like button on the pigeons’ fan page in less than 2 hours”.