Rediscovering the Value of Social Media for Business - in South Africa - Part 1

Neal is back! You’ve heard him talk about keeping it real in your social and your content, and he wants to keep it real. Neal’s goal is always to do this podcast regularly, but everyone’s busy! Since the last podcast, he’s traveled a lot, successfully launched the second Social Tools Summit in San Francisco in October, and spoken at a conference in South Africa. This episode is part one of a radio interview he did while he was there, and focuses on the value of social media and taking a step back and looking at the big picture.

Key Highlights

[04:44] Introduction

[05:26] Why Business To Be Made From Going Social

[06:27] How I Help Businesses

[07:18] How Small Businesses Can Use Social To Grow Their Businesses

[08:07] The Essence of Social Media

[08:32] How to Start Using Social Media for Business

[10:39] Social Media As A New Channel

[12:38] How To Balance Social Media With Voice of the Company

[13:17] The Advent of Employee Advocacy

[14:06] Tomorrow's Talk

[15:27] How Much Time Should You Allocate To Social Media?

[17:56] Coming Down To Your Objectives

Notable Quotes

• Social media has become a major communication channel. But now social media, you have a website and digital, you have TV, radio, and you have social companies investing a lot more in it, because it is the public voice, you have the ability to reach out on a one to many scale that you just couldn't do until now.
• Social is not for business, it's for people.
• Everybody that's online, is basically using social media. And there are ways for us to engage with them on a one on one basis.
• Well, it starts with, like I said, understanding who your customer is, are they even using social media. 
• And that's really where you start at the basic you need to be, you know, everybody knows the media, you need to be publishing content, because that's how you engage in social media. But you also want to be reaching out to people.
• And I like to say social media replaces nothing but compliments everything, right? So it's, it's a new tool, but the old rules of business are still in place.
• But now social media is a new channel, and more and more people are using it. So it's going to be important to keep an eye on and understand how you can use it and to help complement whatever else you do. 
• Companies need to humanize the brand they need to talk like regular people do. And if they're not offering some sort of resource, some sort of utility, some sort of information that's useful to others, people will tune them out.
• Social is not, you know, it's a channel you do not want to sell on, it's the channel you want to have a conversation on and engage with others and really build community from 
• This is where it comes down to your objective, your objective is going to be different than that small business owner, small busi

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