We love this guest blog by Leamington foodies Jabberwocky. Social media is such a diverse and facinating subject and it creates super blogs like this one....
Social Media – the Next Best Thing to
an Apocalypse
Since setting up our business just over a year ago I have come to the conclusion
that social media is not really a choice any more. Gone are the days when you
could simply “not be on facebook” or “not get twitter”. If people don’t have those
options any more, businesses certainly don’t.
As a young business we have grown up with social media as a given. It is more
than just an online presence; it’s who we are and what we do. Given that it
won’t be going away unless the Mayans were right about December, we have
tried to embrace it as best we can, and use it to our advantage.
This is where social media, especially the big two, can easily sneak up and
sneeze in your tea. The conversation is just that: an exchange that goes both
ways. The difference is that rather than keeping itself quietly between two
people this conversation is conducted in the manner of two drama students
discussing their dinners from different ends of a restaurant.
Everyone hears when someone airs their frustration with you on Facebook or
Twitter, and everyone sees how you deal with it afterwards. Distinguishing your
business here is hard, and usually involves a certain amount of humility, while
the rewards seem meagre at most. The good/bad thing about social media -
Facebook especially - is that it is around for ever; so playing the long game
might eventually pay off, while a short term outburst could just come back to
haunt you further down the line.
Luckily a vast majority of the people out there in the internet just want to
be entertained, and providing your content is good enough to get them to
occasionally hit that like button, or perhaps even score a retweet, you are
onto a winner. The only problem then is working out what you have that all of
those other businesses out there don’t. The unique little soupcon that will make
this Twitter or Facebook user want to read your tweets and commit to what in
internet terms is the closest you can get to a lasting relationship: The Follow.
I have yet to encounter the formula for the perfect tweet, and even if I did,
buy tomorrow it would be old news. The constant appears to be an insatiable
lust for something new, and this can easily become a burden. We have twitter
embedded in our website, which keeps the front page interesting, but also
means that we have committed ourselves to regular tweets, so unless we want
the front page to scream “I’ve not looked at this in months” there is no going
back now.
That’s just it with this whole game really: there is no going back. We won’t ever
again live in a world where only food critics can judge restaurants and only Anne
Robinson from Watchdog can call out companies. The new world order puts
consumers so in touch with a business they can almost smell your fear; so my
advice is to pop of a touch of cologne, smile, and for the love of god don’t go
crazy on the exclamation marks.
Thanks to Flic at Jabberwocky for this post you can visit their website and twitter here: