We’ve all seen and read articles about the plethora of new social media outlets. There’s twitter and tweeting, linked-in, facebook, blogs, webcasts, You Tube, wikis and probably others I don’t even know about yet. Many of us are not sure how, or if, any of them will affect our industry and our jobs. How can we use these new forums to promote our business? What efforts will ‘pay off’ and which ones will turn out to be just a waste of our time?
Many (many) years ago, when I first started working in marketing the internet was created. We all read the articles and ‘surfed’ the web at super-slow speeds. We’d sit and wait forever for sites to finish downloading their first page. The word was that the first to join with websites, would get all the future business. So we spent thousands of dollars getting a website created and got all excited as we watched how many hits the site got. I even had a bet with a co-worker about how many sales we would get in the first month from our new website. I was working in a different industry then (although it was still in the machinery manufacturing field). Our sales cycle was many months long, so I predicted zero sales in the first month. My co-worker predicted a minimum of 10 sales. Unfortunately, I won the bet.
As it turned out, it wasn’t necessarily who was first to the internet that counted, but who followed through with promoting their website, keeping it up to date, learning search engine optimization techniques, and staying in touch with all the new technical changes in website development (such as making it interactive, using flash, etc.) The new social media outlets are proving to be very similar. You can’t just start a Facebook site and never go back to keep it up to date. You need to allow friends to log in. The site has to grow and be lively, or it will sit and ‘gather dust’ bringing no value to you or your company.
The experts all seem to agree. You may not need (or want) to try it all. Choose the forum that best fits your company and its culture. Then keep it up. Keep it current. Work on it daily. Promote it to everyone. Let the world know your company makes the best bottle unscramblers and cappers in the whole world! Good luck.
The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at www.neminc.com.
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