Okay, so you know what you want to do with social media.  But can you treat your online consumers the same way like you treat your offline consumers?  Do the same rules apply?  How do you make the transition from broadcasting to the ‘engaged’online community?

In a way the same rules apply, but they’re slightly different between online consumers and offline consumers.  The biggest difference is the amount and the quality of information  they get exposed to and how they use that information in their decision making process.

·  Short attention span.  Depending on who did the research you’ve got from 1 nanosecond to 2 seconds to catch someone’s attention.  Online, it moves even faster. ·  They filter more information.  Because of the information overload they develop the necessary skills to filter more efficiently and more quickly through it all.  This means you have to strip down your information to its essence.

·  Better quality of information.  Logic determines that when there’s more information, you have a better chance of finding quality information. ·  And last but not least, online consumers know what they’re worth.  They know you want to catch their attention and probably know most of the tricks we use.

Understand the power of the community.  Even if it’s not fabricated, the web (that’s the entire web) is a community.  So if in the past you made a mistake, the effects remained locally.  Online, the effects of that same mistake are globally.  Companies face a huge task, but also huge opportunities, if they realize they should target both groups differently. 

·  Strip down your information to its bare minimum.  That doesn’t mean your company slogan, cause chances are it was developed for an offline audience.  It means if you have 4 pages of information, write it down in half a page.  We all know that the story we like to tell is a lot longer than what we should tell.  Catch their attention first, reel them in second and feed them more information third.

·  Release quality.  I read a lot of press releases that are just a waste of bandwidth.  If you’ve got nothing to tell… please wait until you do, there’s enough information going around.  Chances are you’ll stand out.

·  Be honest.  If you’re not, if you even try and distort the truth a bit too much, you risk losing all credibility.  And in an online world, that means global!

·  If it’s possible, make your information target orientated.  No-one expects to be treated like an individual offline.  By that I mean people know that the advertisement in a magazine is made for 1,000,000 readers, not just for them. 

But online people want interaction, and that means they want to be treated as individually as possible.

If companies can truly understand the impact of an online presence, the possible consequences of right/wrong actions and the possible results they have a better chance of making a better business plan than companies who don’t understand it. 

Too many companies dive in for all the wrong reasons (cheap, easy,…) without understanding what the consequences can be…