Let's face it, most Americans have harbored a dismissive attitude about social network services like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter at one point or another. Whether viewed as "a time drain," "a fad," or "child's play," the online social networking universe has had a tough time breaking through to a more grown-up, buttoned-down and professional crowd.
Until now.
When looking at the increasing number of companies large and small that have created Facebook profile pages and begun to "tweet" their latest corporate news and marketing campaigns – it's clear that the digital stream has changed course.
It's a trend that Dr. Dene Grigar has witnessed as a regular user of social media sites. Grigar is Program Director for the Digital Technology and Culture department at Washington State University Vancouver, focusing on communications and project management in the digital media world as part of its curriculum.
Over the past two months, Grigar and the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce organized a similar educational program for local business owners, offering a set of workshops centered on social media. According to Grigar, the idea solidified from the chamber's need to give their members an edge in the recession which making Grigar's free expertise all the more in demand.
"These sites provide a different perspective of how we relay information [that] doesn't necessarily replace the face-to-face, it augments it," Grigar said. "It just doesn't make sense for a business not to use it."
Carol Fenstermacher, director of community relations for Evergreen Public Schools, feels the same way regarding social media. She said the school district began using Facebook and Twitter in early August as "another tool to reach out to parents in the community."
Fenstermacher said Evergreen plans on using the services as an informational channel for the community that encompasses everything from levy and budget information to event and snow day updates.
"[Parents] can give us the proverbial thumbs up, or thumbs down," Fenstermacher said. "And people are so busy nowadays that this offers just one more way they can engage with us … without having to come out to a meeting."
Fenstermacher said these services benefit their communications strategy at next to no cost, which is a key reason Grigar recommends them to small businesses and nonprofits.
High enrollment and positive feedback has resulted in a second term for the program this fall. The workshops cover the entire menu of tools and briefly explain the use of third-party applications for each platform.
Susan Holton, communications manager at the nonprofit Fort Vancouver National Trust, participated in Grigar's sold out workshop on Twitter in mid-July. "It's been a bit of a learning curve, but I think that any organization that wants to share its message with the world today has to get on board with social networking," Holton said.
A national study by market research firm Grunwald Associates found 96 percent of the members of "Generation Y" – a poorly-defined group including those born in the late 1970s to the 1990s – has joined a social network.
However, with little growth potential remaining in the Gen Y market, much of the recent growth in users – 100 million from August 2008 to April 2009 on Facebook alone, according to social networking blog Mashable.com – has come from older Americans. According to Facebook, the fastest growing demographic on its website is females age 55 to 65.
The shift in demographics among users of social networking sites is good news for Southwest Washington Medical Center. The Vancouver-based hospital is currently operating about six different Facebook accounts – one of which hones in on an older target audience.
SWMC Director of Marketing Chad Dillard said the hospital originally started using SNS because they thought it would be a good way to promote their new birth center to a younger demographic.
"It's a tool that's come along so fast that it wasn't even in the marketing mix, or thought process, a year ago," Dillard said. "Our next step is to take our traditional approaches, with things such as community education, and apply new methods that can reach more people."
This is exactly what First Independent Bank did in mid August when they "tweeted" their quarterly commentary on the financial markets. Normally, this document would have reached clients on a traditional mailing list, but Twitter allowed them to broadcast to a broader target – literally anyone who cared about the bank's take on the nature of financial sustainability.
Jennifer Griffin, a product manager for the Ridgefield-based bank, said First Independent used an application to track the traffic of the tweets covering a broad spectrum of breaking financial news. The technology made pinpointing potential and current customer sentiments pretty simple. "I think that because people have that choice to click, or not to click, it really tells us something when we analyze the data of our content." Griffin said.
One of Griffin's recent "tweets" announced an open position at First Independent. The experiment spread so quickly that the bank is now considering using Twitter for future job postings.
Twitter is part of a growing trend among hiring managers in all sectors of the economy.
John Johnson, senior director of human resources at Vancouver semiconductor, laser and fiber-optics supplier nLIGHT, is no stranger to utilizing social media for hiring decisions. Johnson's site of choice, LinkedIn, is a social media tool that is used as a primary source in recruiting by 95 percent of the respondents to a survey by applicant and recruiter tracker Jobvite.
"I think employers who fail to use social networking in recruiting miss out on an opportunity to target specific demographics," Johnson said. "When you recruit and network, you have to go where the people are, and that's where the people are today."
Johnson said that nLIGHT has been growing with SNS technology, claiming the various social platforms they use have increased efficiency by opening secondary and tertiary informational sources.
"Now when I broadcast, people I know may put me in contact with someone they know who is specialized to suit my needs," Johnson said. "But once I make those contacts, nothing beats the telephone. In the end, the best communication still comes down to person-to-person contact."
Grigar thinks local small businesses can capitalize on the competitive advantage social media offers them. The opportunity is where the technological world meets the real world. Grigar said local small businesses are able to establish true community when they combine the use of SNS platforms and customer interaction in a consistent and thoughtful way.
"Vancouver is built on the notion of community and that's what social media does, it fosters that," Grigar said. "[Local businesses] need to use social media not just to send out cold messages, but to build this community – a notion of togetherness, support and all the things that we appreciate about a smaller town."
SNS: Websites focused on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others that provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
Twitter: A free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as "tweets," which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to their subscribers, known as "followers."
Facebook: A social networking website allows users to add friends, send text and multimedia messages, update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves and join networks organized by city, workplace, school, region or product.
LinkedIn: A business-oriented social networking website that is mainly used by professionals to find and connect with one another through shared social contacts and to post resumes, contact information and relevant professional information on profiles.
*SOURCE: Company websites and Wikipedia (an SNS encyclopedia).
