Blog readers and twitterers scoffed at my suggestion that CAD vendors spend less time on social media. Yesterday Silicon Alley Insider presented a number of business cases where marketing through social media made no sense in Why You Should Consider Turning Your Back On Social Media.
As with any technology, you should embrace it when it makes sense, and keep a bit of distance when it does not. Too often, people and corporations embrace technology because it is new, not because it is useful. Calculate the ROI. Or, as one person put it in the SAI article:
That's because, as Hess points out, "social media has value. We just haven't figured out how to make it have value for us."
In my case, I use the following hierarchy:
- Major articles appear in the upFront.eZine newsletter weekly.
- Late-breaking news and minor articles appear on this WorldCAD Access blog, primarily. I follow a dozen other blogs through RSS feeds.
- One-sentence observations end up on twitter.com/ralphg -- when and as I have time. (I don't do any Twitter tracking of me or other topics, and I follow just 15 lucky people.)
- Facebook is strictly for personal use.
I think you can keep turning your back until your customers/audience request otherwise. I think you once tweeted that's why you got on Twitter - subscribers requested updates there.
It's funny that 2 of the 15 lucky people you follow are fake Twitter accounts ;-)
Posted by: Dora Smith | Nov 11, 2010 at 01:11 PM
You can calculate the ROI of something only after you have understood it and have started using it properly. Stopping an experiment halfway because you have not achieved the final result does not make much sense. Social media means different things to different people. Thats because their target audience differs vastly in terms of what they expect. I salute the companies who are embracing social media and trying to find out what's the right way to do it.
Posted by: Deelip | Nov 11, 2010 at 02:55 PM