If my business doesn’t become social, will it survive?

Grant Leboff:  Let me ask you this; you say that not all businesses are going to be social and there are some that may never be social, and I agree with you. But then I come, perhaps, to a different conclusion, or may be the same conclusion as you. You say that perhaps they can use traditional marketing or whatever else.

My actual conclusion is that because of the cultural changes that social media is bringing with it; transparency, the fact that more and more word-of-mouth is going online, so instead of telling a few friends – I tweet and then, quite honestly, it is out of my system and I don’t worry about it any more – then actually, I am not sure – I haven’t got a crystal ball – but if their business can’t become social, whether it can survive?

It’s not that social media is the only marketing channel in the world, that’s not what I’m saying, but it’s that; the transparency, the authenticity, the conversation, the personalisation – even on a mass scale – that is required / expected for a business that is on social today, I think people are going to come to expect from all businesses and, therefore, if businesses don’t do it to a point, some might be more social than others… can they survive?

David Taylor:  It’s a very valid point and I would agree with you wholeheartedly. Business has always had to adapt, it’s always had to change. And if you really can’t change, then you become a dinosaur and it may well be that you don’t exist.

We’ve seen some huge brands just disappear off the high street. Names that we’ve known for years, for decades. They have just disappeared. They haven’t adapted, and you do have to adapt. It’s Darwinian theory, adapt or die! And that is very true of social, and I think, yes it’s the businesses that do want to be social.

And for me what I think is quite interesting is that smaller, more mobile businesses, find it easier, to be social. If you are a big corporation it’s very difficult… That would be an interesting one, if you had to be a truly social, and a multinational, organisation, it could take some doing because it’s all about the culture.

I did a training course for an organisation in Geneva recently. And they had their own internal social network, which was linked to their intranet. The course that I was running with them was about ‘engagement’ – getting employees engaged in their own internal social network. They are spread out all over the world, so how do you get even the internal stakeholders engaged with each other? And what came out of that was that I had a blinding ‘flash of the obvious’ which was ‘good social media starts internally’.

If I am going to be working with an organisation, I need to look at the culture, and it comes back to your point at the start, which is about social businesses and whether they have that social culture. What you might have to do is inculcate that social culture with them, so they say; ‘David we want to be social’. That’s fine. I work with them for a while… [Shakes head] You’re not actually social, [sighs]… You’re nowhere near ready to be social! Actually we’ve really got to sort out your customer service, you’ve got no internal comms – so none of the departments are talking to each other – and you’re not really aware of what’s going on in your marketplace. So you need to then work with them to get them to the stage where they are then ready to start doing social.

And for me, certainly in the consultancy business in which I am working now, I am more like a management consultancy than social media, because it’s actually managing change within organisations.

And where are those organisations going? Do you really think that your target audience are still going to consume the media in the way that you think they are going to consume it? I horrify people when I say that people aged 25 or less, are not on Facebook any more. How are you going to communicate with them? ‘I haven’t even got my head around Facebook and you’re already saying that they’ve gone past Facebook?’

You need to be talking about Vine and Tumbler and Keek and all these sort of sites. You have to deal with all these things. It’s that mobility, that ability to change. Change your business, change where we are going. That is a very key thing.

And the ones who don’t, will cease to exist.

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