Not many software applications become the subject of Oscar-winning films. So the success of 2010’s The Social Network is one sign of the way that social media have rapidly become entrenched in everyday life. For example, about half of the entire British population already uses Facebook, whose story the film told.

And it’s also no surprise that, with their customers using social media daily, amusements and gaming businesses are staking out their own presence in this new channel. Among those well-established on Facebook, for example, are Namco Bandai Games, Grosvenor Casinos, William Hill, Brunswick Bowling and IGT – and there are countless gaming-related interest groups not dedicated to a particular vendor on this and other social-media services.

What’s more, although it is the dominant one currently, Facebook is far from the only social-media service. B2B companies, for instance, may well find LinkedIn a better fit with their objectives. For some Twitter is the preferred channel, and so on.

However, these new channels pose challenges as well as opportunities for business.

The opportunities include the chance to engage with consumers in a much more personal way than traditional media allow, even to the level of one-to-one communication. Social media is, at heart, about developing a conversation rather than sending a message and hoping someone is listening.

The challenges include managing the business’s social presence so that it is compatible with the generally informal, non-corporate user culture of these electronic gathering places, and yet remains compliant with brand values and business objectives.

There is not a single formula for success in social media. The media themselves are highly diverse and their users even more so; there are short-term fads as well as longer-lasting trends. So, success is most likely to come from approaching social media with the right philosophy and then adapting it to particular circumstances. One principle that is unlikely to change, for example, is that every element of an organisation’s social programme must add value for the customer (or potential customer).

What’s it all about?

In practical terms, the key characteristics of social media are that they are consumer-facing services based (for now) on the World Wide Web that enable people to create and share content, on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis. They are generally free and open to anyone interested, although some offer enhanced memberships with extra features for a fee, and of course some of the  marketing opportunities that they present also come with a price tag attached.

Virtually all content on a social site is generated by its users (including businesses and other organisations, as well as individuals). The operators of the site only provide the technology platform that enables this.

The most straightforward way for a business to benefit from social media is to use it as an advertising medium: because it is free to the consumer, it is usually (although not always) advertising-funded. However, this is not fundamentally different from any other form of Internet display advertising, and extracts no value from social media’s special characteristics – merely from the size of its audience.

So, while advertising on social media may be tactically useful, longer-term strategic benefits are likely to arise from a fuller engagement, enabling businesses to listen to consumers, ask questions, make new contacts and keep in touch with existing ones, provide practical help such as technical support and responses to pre-sales enquiries, subtly encourage action (the hard sell is not appropriate in social media), maintain credibility and awareness of the business among consumers, and – last but not least – communicate with employees, investors and other stakeholders.

But it is important to define precisely what your presence is intended to achieve, and how you will measure that. Is it to make first contact with potential customers? To support existing customers? To drive cross-sales? It may be all these and more, but each one of them must contribute to overall business goals and be individually measurable to allow a true picture of the return on investment offered by a social-media project.

Who, within the organisation, will contribute to social media? This may be one of the hardest balances to strike. By the nature of the medium, its users will probably prefer to carry on their conversations with “real people” – for example, the engineers who designed the game they play. But that may not always be practically possible.

Creating your strategy

One pioneer of social media has identified three principal questions that must be tackled in defining a social media strategy. They are:

Objectives and metrics – why are we doing this in the first place; what do we wish to achieve? And how do we measure whether we are indeed achieving it?

Risks and mitigation – what are the risks of using these channels; how do we minimise them? It’s worth bearing in mind that having a managed approach toward social media should itself mitigate a great deal of the potential risks. The organisation which truly invites disaster through social media is the one which allows its use to proliferate ignored and unchecked.

Channel proposition and management – which of the many social-media channels  will we use, and how in day-to-day practice will we generate content, engage in interaction, and provide oversight?

The initial step of defining objectives, and audiences, will go a long way toward identifying the most appropriate channel, and it is crucially important that the target audience and the type of interaction desired with them dictates the channel rather than vice-versa. For example, although there are no technical barriers, Facebook is not a sensible way to reach opinion-formers within your industry, or LinkedIn a useful platform to provide product support to consumers.

While their growth has been explosive, these channels of communication remain in their infancy, and if one thing is certain it is that they will both change and become more pervasive.

A likely development is the addition of social features to all kinds of technology interfaces – not just the Web. For example, it’s easy to imagine how a smartphone of the future might use near field communication to “tell” an AWP unit about the Facebook account of the consumer (the phone’s owner) who is playing the game, and then let them share game details with their Facebook friends, or compete in an online league.

The possibilities are endless – and the businesses that are involved near the beginning of this shift in the way that we communicate will be well-positioned to extract the maximum benefit from them.

Ten tips for social success

• Your organisation will become part of the social media conversation anyway, whether you like it or not. Ensure you are there to make your voice heard.

• Let the desired audience dictate the platform, not vice-versa.

• Metrics should align with business goals, not with what is most easily measurable.

• Take the rough with the smooth – you will get negative feedback from time to time.

• Buy-in is important. At the planning stage, invite sceptics as well as proponents.

• Consistency of message and tone is paramount.

• Ensure you can deliver – both in terms of regular engagement once you have entered this world, and in terms of fulfilling in the real world any promises that you make socially. A social-media project is unlikely to succeed without a customer-service culture to back it up.

• In larger organisations, consider implementing an internal social project as a learning exercise before a customer-facing one.

• Minimise risks by educating staff and having clear policies for social media in place, rather than micro-managing content. Nothing kills the spontaneity of social media like a requirement for every tweet to be rubber-stamped!

• Never, ever, ever lie.

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