7 Reasons Why Investing in an Internal Community Makes Solid Business Sense

A community challenges us to bring our best to a situation. We invest in the community and they invest in us. And in that manner, we share our goals to build something that becomes a common cause. When we bring all of who we are, full engagement of head and heart, 7 deeper values and higher outcomes show up in our work.

1. Complete presence — focus. We’re all there — the all thinking business is no longer sufficient. The business is more well-rounded and friendly to the people who help it thrive. Computers can’t smile. Computers can’t listen to the spaces between words. People conceive, design, build, buy and talk what we sell.

Peak performance — productivity. A computer might work every minute achieving great computation effort, but it will only be as good as the people who program it and it will never over-achieve its programming. People invest more, do more, go further for the work we love. People connect to other people who are doing that.

Tolerance — perseverance. We have more patience, time, and energy for problem solving when we directly reap the benefits. Peter Drucker proved that money is a disincentive … it has the most effect when it’s not there or too small. What leads folks to achieve greatness is the payoffs that a loyal community offers: support, feedback, acknowledgment, sense of purpose.

Value and Appeal — compelling story. To compete a product or service has to be useful and beautiful. Simple and elegant, for to the adult and the kid in each one of us. Bringing logic and emotion to a business outdistances the world view of logic alone. Competence and great execution are expected. A loyal community builds in added value in how they tell the story, how they treat the product and the customers who buy it, and how they talk about the company as a value in their lives. What’s more appealing than working with someone who’s not only good but also loves his or her job?

Total Differentiation — identity. An internal community develops it’s own culture and identity. The uniqueness of that common bound shines through in concept and execution. The respect of a loyal community shows in everything it does. It becomes it’s own barrier to entry. The competition can’t knock that off.

Fully Invested and Worth Investing In — market value. Rolling all of the above values into one, nothing beats the 360 degree investment of brains, money, and dreams all in the same direction. Any financial firm worth its salt looks for that combination when funding a small business.

Sense of Worth — authority. Community builds authority. We value what we earn and what we love. That value telegraphs itself. It’s contagious. Customers, vendors, and partners pick it up as well.

A dynamic, engaging internal community where people love what they do and are fully engaged to share their brilliance is one of the primary keys to sustained success in most any business organization.

More than a quarter of web users 65 and up now visiting social networks

Older web users are flocking to social networks, according to a May 2010 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. Usage among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled during the past year, from 22% to 42%.

More specifically, 47% of 50-to-64-year-old internet users and 26% of seniors ages 65 and up indicate that they now use these sites, with Facebook and LinkedIn being the main beneficiaries of the more mature traffic.

Most of this grow of social networking for people over 50 is on Facebook. Facebook is becoming less about high school and college and is more and more family oriented and crossing generations.

With more places to share content on more networks, each having their own diverse social graphs, connections and features, many of us are splintering our online identities, choosing one or a few communities over others, and optimizing our sharing and consumption to fit the model that best works for us – and that self-assessment should be constantly changing as our own preferences, and those sites’ capabilities change. But what will never change is people’s desire to feel important and interesting, whether they are creators, sharers, commenters or even lurkers.

Wondering if anyone is reading your blog posts, Tweets or Facebook Updates?

There are plenty of places and ways to share what’s important to you in social media. I believe the opportunity is in sharing ideas and information that mean something to you and your organization and that resonate with your fans and followers.

For most businesses if you can extend your network beyond face to face word of mouth social media is extremely valuable. If you want to build stronger relationships with your customers paying attention to your customers and potential customers by listening and responding can help strengthen real relationships. If you can help solve a challenge or provide helpful information you are providing value service to the people that care about what you do.

Social media is a people movement. People like to connect with other people of like interests. The technology makes it possible but people are still at the center. Focus on your people and being helpful and you will be successful.

Social media is no longer new, but it’s still a turbulent space. Just a couple years ago MySpace was on top of the world, only to be ousted unceremoniously by crowds flocking to Facebook. Twitter crept onto the scene and then exploded with growth in 2009, putting itself on every marketer’s radar. New trends are developing in the social location-based area, and that’s not counting the seemingly constant mergers, acquisitions, startups and failures.

Little wonder that marketers find it difficult to stay on top of the hottest social media trends. A May 2010 survey from staffing firm The Creative Group found that 65% of US marketing executives considered it at least somewhat challenging to keep up.

It’s can be difficult to keep up in the ever changing social media world. It’s important to have a clear strategy and a well understood foundation of who you are in all forms of communication. Social media is no different. The platforms and tactics may change but who you are and your message can remain clear and consistent.

It is important for most businesses to participate in social media at some level. It is not important to go chasing everything new. It is important to find a few things that work, stick with them while paying attention to changes and trends and keep the connections flowing with the people that love what you do.

It really is pretty simple.

The interwebs are alight with discussions about Facebook‘s new location-based checkin service Places. Among the flurry of info and debate about its value, one thing may have been overlooked: The secret ingredient of the system that may end up making Facebook a lot of money. Because as well as trying to attract users, Facebook’s also trying to attract local businesses to build Facebook Place pages, and associate their Facebook presence with a location.

For now it’s a slightly complicated affair to get location data into your Page if you’re a business–involving creating a new Places page, and then associating the two together. It even looks like not every business page owner can do this final piece of the puzzle yet, and Facebook seems to be alerting specific people about the system. Quite apart from this foible, the Places feature is pretty powerful, and notionally works much like business-owned pages in Yelp. Essentially you build a PR page, and then try to attract fans who’ll then checkin when they arrive at the site. Fans get to “play” the location game, businesses get to work out who their clients are–for promotional purposes or even (if they can get hold of demographic data) for business planning or targeted marketing reasons.

But Facebook is the engine behind all this, don’t forget–the worlds largest social network, with data on over 500 million users. Stripping the concept of Facebook to its core, one realizes that Facebook’s biggest bankable “value” is the structure of this network (with IDs for each user) and the web of links between friends–everything else about Facebook rests on this core.

If you have a locally based business the new Facebook Places is something to watch.

20 billionth tweeter GGGGGGo_Lets_Go. Photograph: Twitter

It has been accused of proliferating pointless babble online and the 20 billionth message on Twitter will have done little to rebut such criticism.

The exact meaning of the landmark tweet on Saturday by a graphic designer in Tokyo is difficult to work out as it was part of a larger conversation: “So that means the barrage might come back later all at once.”

But his reaction to having sent the 20 billionth tweet since the microblogging site launched in July 2006 was much easier to understand.

“It looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I’m getting replies from people all over the world. It’s scary. What are the chances? Maybe I’m going to die. Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke,” he wrote moments later.

Twitter’s popularity in Japan has soared in the past year with the company estimating that the Japanese send about 12% of all tweets worldwide, second only to the US.

One reason for this surge is that it is possible to say much more in Japanese than in English within Twitter’s 140 character limit. Twitter activity reached an all time high of 3,283 tweets per second during the Japan-Denmark game in this year’s World Cup.

It is just two months since Twitter’s 15-billionth tweet and only five months since the ten billionth, which took four years to reach. Worldwide around 300,000 users are signing up for new accounts every day.

Obviously Twitter is growing faster than ever!

MARKETing now typically means using a variety of online distribution channels via paid & organic search (SEM/SEO) on Google, viral/social amplification on new media platforms & social networks like Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube, and the quickly-growing mobile platforms of Apple iPhone & Google Android. With the exception of search, most of these distribution channels didn’t exist 5 years ago, yet they now easily reach over 100M-500M+ users, with very low cost and measurable marketing campaigns such that even a small team can reach billions of people globally.

I pulled this quote from a post by Fred Wilson about Dave McClure’s investment thesis. There is a lot of opportunity for a small business person to tap into these online distribution channels and reach a global or a local audience.

While many marketers struggle with how to measure social media marketing return on investment, some businesses are finding at least one hard metric where their efforts have paid off—customer acquisition.

According to a February–March 2010 survey from office services firm Regus, smaller companies see the most success, with nearly half of small businesses around the world having acquired a customer through social networks. Large companies were less successful, but more than a quarter had seen social success through customer acquisition. This was despite large companies being more likely to devote budgets to social marketing.

Interesting statistic that show more small businesses are reporting increased customer acquisition through their social networking activity.

Want to know more about the Old Spice Twitter & You Tube campaign that is currently lighting up the social web? Fast Company interviewed the advertising team behind the campaign.

I believe most small businesses could learn something from this article that they can apply to their own social media strategy.