Filed under: marketing — kevin @ June 15, 2008

Interestingly enough, BusinessWeek wrote a prescient article a few years ago called “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” They recently decided to revisit the topic, as even though it’s been just a few years, much has changed. For example, Friendster is no longer the top social network.

The newly updated article from earlier this month (now rightly retitled “Social Media Will Change Your Business” states:

“But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

These social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. Workers can fritter away hours on YouTube. They can use social networks to pillory a colleague or leak secrets. That’s the downside, and companies that don’t adapt are sure to get lots of it.

But there’s an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it’s growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose “blogs” from our headline. The revised title: “Social Media Will Change Your Business.”"

The article goes on to state that Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in half a million dollars of new orders in the last year.

Just one of the many ways companies could (and should) be using social networks for marketing and advertising.