Digital Media Buzz > Why Big Business Fails at Social Media

Why Big Business Fails at Social Media

By Channon Cary

Most of those in the social media sphere have noticed something interesting — that big businesses seems to be completely stalled in implementing and executing social media strategies, or that they have done so with minimal to no success. A recent study by the University of Massachusetts found that as of March, only 81 of the Fortune 500 companies had so much as a single blog posted in the last 12 months on their company website.   

Even leaving out the common perceptions held of large corporations — often slow to change, multiple levels of hierarchy, too big to be efficient — there are still some issues more prevalent within big business that may be driving this trend. 

Ambiguous Expectations

• Corporations are data driven monsters. If a metric can’t be found to measure effectiveness, which
• translates into bottom-line dollars, most companies don’t want to waste time with it. They’ve learned their
• lessons in the past, watching their dollars go into ambiguous ventures — whether it was soft skills training, or the employee engagement flavor of the month — and they are loathe to do so again. Shareholders demand return on investment, even more so in today’s economy, and the real truth is that most large corporations struggle to translate social media investments and strategies into this numbers-driven language of business. 

Even companies that have dipped their feet into the waters of social media — creating a Facebook page, opening a Twitter account or two, having an employee write a blog — really never do more than these surface things. Time passes after the initial rush of creation and the corporation finds itself wondering what it is supposed to do with its newfound tools.  

Large corporations often lack more than a blanket strategy of ‘we will have a social media presence’ when they attempt to enter this arena. Clear, finite objectives need to be set, outlining what they want to accomplish, why, and how they will see success. And while traffic, sales and popularity analytics provide some numbers and data to satiate the business’ appetite for metrics with a hard line to the source, it’s important to also think about other measures and goals — equally documentable. Measures like brand awareness, brand attitude, market share, number and types of customer or product issues found and addressed compared to other customer feedback sources. 

Overly Reliant on Existing Communication Methods
Inherently, most corporations and their leaders understand that social media is different, and that it’s big. According to a recent Fortune article, more than 15 million users are updating their status daily on Facebook alone. Those numbers are hard for anyone to ignore, let alone big business, which thrives on numbers. Logically, corporations understand the new reality of customers talking about their products, experiences and opinions on blogs, with their friends, out in the worldwide, online community.  

What big companies don’t seem to understand is how they are supposed to connect with customers in this medium. Consequently, while they know there is a new reality out there with regards to customers, corporations become immobilized, doing almost nothing with this information.

The reason they don’t know how to connect to customers in this new and different way, is they continue to cling solely to one-way, push communication methodology, driven by teams of marketing and advertising professionals, finessed by the public relations team, consisting of exactly the message they wanted to convey. Big companies have grown comfortable with their methodology of crafting, controlling and pushing out their desired message to the public. And, certainly, they’ve been successful with these methods otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are today.

Social media success requires something more. It requires corporations to not only acknowledge that the reality of customer relationships has changed, but that they might benefit from changing their strategies and methods as well. This would require, however, that companies relinquish the control of only pushing out their message, and do two things as priority — sit back and listen and attempt instead to entice and pull customers to you. Engage them with a compelling message and platform, encouraging them to visit, to talk, to trust.

Mass vs. Niche Mentality
Bigger is not necessarily better in the world of social media, at least if it comes at the expense of individuality and connecting to unique characteristics of different segments of a customer base. Large corporations have cut costs, streamlined production, gained greater efficiencies in operations by standardizing and capitalizing on the Pareto 80-20 rule of business — focusing on the big wins and big issues. 

But this corporate wisdom of ignoring the minority and niche groups as unprofitable and resource intensive may no longer apply, particularly with the Internet. Focusing on the niche groups is precisely what venues like Facebook, Twitter and blogging offer to the corporation — a potentially cost-efficient and effective method of reaching customers. And while prevalent corporate customer feedback systems like focus groups, point-of-service surveys and complaints may eventually give the company information about what customers think, social media offers more immediate, real-time insight. And the faster you have information, the more time you have to do something with it. 

Perhaps corporations haven’t quite wrapped their arms around the phenomenon that is social media, and in light of the legacy systems and ways of thinking that have enabled their current success, it’s not totally surprising. However, the reality is although the players may change and evolve, the power and reach of social networking and media venues is only growing, and perhaps it’s time for big businesses to take another long, hard look at what they’re doing — or not doing — to develop in new ways to meet this rising change.

Channon is a corporate telecommuter, specializing in the globally thrilling world of HR and talent development for more than 14 years. Questions and comments can be sent via e-mail to channon.cary@gmail.com.