Growing up, social media go to work

[This article is part of our continuing series, "Social Media: Promise & Peril." Series posts are denoted by the signature logo, and are collected on the Social Media page, a link to which you will find at the Social Media tab at the top of this page.]

Social media like Twitter and Facebook are growing up and going to work. In this transition from toy to tool, they are passing through a nebulous world where they’ve lost their “thriller” app status conveyed by adolescents, but have yet to gain acceptance by productivity focused office managers and protective IT chiefs.

In this evolutionary environment you simultaneously have Morgan Stanley’s London youth observer saying that “No one uses Twitter” any longer while an estimated 70% of American corporations ban social media in the workplace.

The Harvard Business Review continues to write about social media, so they’ve got to be at least close to mainstream. And they are — with prescient marketers who have figured out how to make social networks actually go to work for them with specific goals and in well-defined business deployments.

Given the market scale of social network services (SNS), their commercial potential is huge.

Nielsen Online reports that Twitter grew its comparatively small base audience by an astounding 1,382% February 08-to-February 09, “registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month” in 2009, according to Mashable.

Total SNS audience numbers are even more impressive, and inviting to savvy marketers as shown in the chart below. the data for which comes form Nielsen.

Clearly something is happening, even though it may not be among the original <18 demographic.

And what’s happening is that social networks are coming of age, morphing into valuable communications tools that can help mainstream businesses become more effective, efficient and competitive.

But, you may ask, “How can any grown-up possibly cram any useful information into a mere 140 characters” including spaces, which is Twitter’s message limit.

The folks at the consumer electronics giant Best Buy have figured it out, and their application should be a learning moment for other corporate leaders.

Best Buy’s social media app is Twelpforce. It is their free outreach to customers and prospective customers who have technology questions and problems. It is an extension of their pay-for-service offering, the Geek Squad, and leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support services in the Twitter environment.

Granted, even if customers’ problems are not simple, the Twelpforce 140-character answers must be. For example, the response part of a recent exchange is: “In most cases, if you can log into Safe Mode, you do so as admin, and can reset your password.”

That probably solved the questioner’s problem, and contributed to a good feeling about Best Buy — and it only required 93 total spaces!

Then, there are the answers to product questions that likely will lead to a sale: “Main diff is size/lens and ultra has removable AA batteries while the Mino has a rechargeable batt. I like both,” the Twelpforce employee advised.

Best Buy has demonstrated a simple yet innovate way to engage customers and nurture relationships while cutting expenses (by reducing telephone calls regarding simple questions) and creating a powerful new sales channel.

IT chiefs may shun social apps in order to protect their networks and departmental managers may see them and productivity distractions and giant time-sucks, but when approached thoughtfully and strategically — as Best Buy has done — social media can become valuable aspects of the company-client relationship.

Postscript: Best Buy’s move to leverage the commercial potential of pop technology plays squarely into the demographic evolution of Twitter and the other social network services.

“SNS user have gone from being classic early adopters — male, highly educated, young to middle-aged, urban — to every man and woman with a continued skew towards youth as diverse, if not more than the Internet-using population.” That is the heart of BB’s market.

The SNS demographic shift research is detailed in “The Democratization of Online Social Networks,” a study released Oct. 8, 2009, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.