Making Money from Content

Just read this article in Mashable, “How Startups are Using Social Media for Real Results”. The basic premise: startups should make social media the centerpoint of their communication tools, as it’s cheaper.

Can’t argue that. However, it got me thinking of other ways that startups can take advantage of Social Media that weren’t noted in the piece.

Using social media as a coherent and actionable approach to updating investors and the investment community (especially if you are a public start up) can save an incredible amount of time for the senior team as they deal with ensuring that the messages are always clear, and consistent.

Educating and training your supporters on where, when, and how to find the information is critical…and as the piece suggests, requires a great deal of commitment. But the opportunity – not to mention efficiencies – far outweighs the short-term challenges and provides a great outlet for idea mashing and just as importantly feedback.

To answer my own question here: no, results and social media are not an oxymoron. We just need to help people define what real results should be viewed as.

Not every call into a call center is monitored and edited, so why should you want or try to do that with social media? This is the question to ask your clients if they’re wanting to go through multiple levels of approval at all levels of social media engagement.

Your goal should be to train staff on how to engage in social media in a way that answers questions correctly and stays within your corporate brand. That was the discussion I had with Daryl Stansfield, Digital Account Director at PHD, in Toronto, ON. I was happy that he mentioned having a previous financial client (see previous post about financial concerns in social media) that had a Facebook forum that was so successful that users started helping users.