Why businesses think Social Media is a waste of time!

 participating in LinkedIn discussion ...

I continue to advise the setting up and absolute commitment to maintaining conventional channels of communication, ie content population within well-constructed website and the digital marketing portfolio, before venturing too far into social networking. Blogs and video can now be naturally incorporated into good CMS systems, and audience groups can be segmented to generate email when something new and relevant is posted.

The role of social media will, of course, vary depending on the nature of the company - I'm coming from more of the public sector / B2B angle. If the subject matter or nature of the business requires a degree of communications urgency or networking that social media enables then, great, tweeting takes the message to a new level.

Companies need to understand what additional value the social marketing channels are going to bring – but from the audience perspective! The novelty of social media is reaching its tipping point and it will be the audiences who decide what is and what is not useful (hence the 'social' in social networking)

But social media can only add sustainable benefit if the basic communications infrastructure is fully in place and habitually utilised.