customer service

A recent report by Reuters cites a study conducted for Citibank Small Business that found out majority of small businesses do not use social media for business purposes. According to the survey, 75% of the respondents don’t find social networks and mediums like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as useful in expanding their business networks or generating leads. 86% has responded that they don’t even use information from social mediums as a source for business advice.

I say small businesses stand to gain much from using social media in their day to day operations.

Granted, most small businesses out there are probably brick-and-mortar operations, which have a small sales, manufacturing, service or other activities as its main source of income. Some of these may be home-based or freelance/professional basis. Indeed, many small businesses go on by without the need to engage social mediums on a day to day basis.

But social media can definitely help small businesses expand their network, and do marketing at lightning speeds at dirt cheap costs. Offhand, here are a few benefits of social media that I think small businesses should consider.

Viral marketing

For any business, there’s nothing like a viral marketing campaign done right. Word of mouth, after all, is a very effective tool in the dissemination of information, especially if it’s done among people who are considered to be connectors. The real measure of how effective a small business can do viral marketing is not by the number of people whom you can share information with. Rather, success can be determined by the importance and influence of the people you share this information with. Social media users who are influential and trusted are better at word of mouth marketing, especially if they are within fields of interest relevant to your product or service.

Market research

Not all businesses can afford to hire marketing consultancy firms to determine market trends and do research. The Internet is rich with this information, to some extent. For instance, you can use Google Trends to spot trends in user interest for certain keywords and phrases. You can look for product reviews to find what customers are looking for. You can even search for mentions on Twitter and on blog review sites to find what people are saying about your industry or product.

Custmer relations

In the eyes of a consumer, the best companies are those that are transparent with their dealings with the public. It’s best for any business to build up trust with the consumer base. One of the ways you can do this is by being accessible from all possible channels. Most businesses already have a website. But having a contact form that lets you receive emails might not be enough. If you bring your conversations online–like through a blog, forum or Twitter, then you have a better chance at resolving possible problems even before they happen. If you’re lucky, passionate users might even build interest groups themselves, and it will be the community that does the support for your clients.

Any small business stands to gain a lot with social media. Even if the benefits may not be direct, it’s a matter of extending goodwill and enhancing your presence in an ever growing community of connected individuals. Being active on Facebook, Twitter, in blogging and forums may not necessarily be able to directly result in added sales, revenues and expanded business. But by being connected, you can start building up a network and you can gain the trust of your audience.

image credit: flickr/caseywest

Magic 8 ball I love Gmail. I use it everyday. It’s the first thing I open whenever I launch my browser. I actually have several Gmail inboxes open at any single time–this includes my main “gmail.com” email and another Gmail for domains account. I also use the mobile Gmail application on my Nokia Series-60 phone. What I like is its seamless integration with Gmail features, like labels, seach functionality and address book. And since it’s a native Symbian application (and not Java), it’s fast.

But there’s one thing I don’t like about Gmail for mobile. Once you’re connected, it seems to assume you have a constant connection to the Internet. And therefore, in the even that I walk out of a WiFi hotspot’s range, my mobile phone incessantly asks me for a connection until either (1) I select a valid connection, (2) activate a new connection, or (3) turn off Gmail.

In case #1, I should be in an active WiFi hotspot, in the absence of which I have to resort to #2, which means I have to pay connection charges (minimal, but annoying if it accumulates unnecessarily). Since I don’t want to spend extra money on unnecessary connectivity, I often select option #3. However, since the software incessantly asks me for a connection, this usually involves some keypad calisthenics, which requires me to bring up the task manager, hit the “kill” button (the erase button on the S60) and hit the confirmation button. All this while shooing away the connection window every nanosecond or so.

What’s my point in all this? I think it’s all about a usability issue. These days, you would rarely see a piece of software that doesn’t bother you for an Internet connection to update something. In fact, most would rather just go ahead and initiate a connection without your knowledge. My issue here is about the software doing something on its own, and it’s something I would rather have it not do. Software these days are too smart that it makes you feel stupid. Sometimes you have to fight with it in order to maintain some semblance of control.

It makes me feel as if developers (and businesspeople who own the services) are assuming too much. Suddenly, everyone is assuming that we all have a running Internet connection wherever we go, whatever time it is, and that we don’t care how much we spend. Well, some of us want to keep our privacy, thank you. We want to be able to control when we get online, how we get online, and how much we spend getting online.

This would be a good question to ask yourself when you’re in the process of developing an application, or just about any business (online or offline). Do you assume too much? Do you do too much of the thinking for your clients or intended userbase? Is everything becoming too automated that manual intervention would suddenly become tedious and cumbersome?

Don’t take anything for granted. Just because you’re overflowing with bandwidth doesn’t mean everyone else is enjoying the same connectivity. Just because you have massive processing power doesn’t mean everyone else’s computer is fast.

This is the core of most usability tests–try to drop all assumptions and take take things afresh. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your intended client. Try to see things from the perspective of someone who knows nothing . Try to put yourself in his situation. Will your application or service still be as cool, interesting and usable as it is from your own point of view?

Oftentimes, it’s looking from outside that we can see as objectively as possible. When you assume too much, you tend to narrow your field of vision too much, and you could lose sight of the more important things.

Image credit: flickr/banlon1964