Social Media @ Work?

As mentioned in the first class, I am not a heavy user of social media even in my personal life. Even now as a MBA student, I cannot decide whether I can be the “real” me or the “professional kind” of me. There are more and more social media platforms, and the role of social media becomes complicated or overlapping. Same as for work, even though social media can be very powerful to strengthen culture or improve customer relationship, I believe having a clear strategy and use case of social media are critical.

When I interned at Google last summer, I worked with Google Global Partner Marketing team for a new partner program project. While I cannot disclose anything about the project, I did want to share some findings when I was doing research for the project. Google Partner team use different channels to engage with their partners (ad agencies) — including emails, google+, youtube and twitter etc. Having these social media channels does allow the team to deliver more interesting or innovative contents to the customer. However what concerns me is unnecessary or repetitive message to our partners.

As Global Partner team, we do not own any market — meaning we do create strategy and guidance but do not involve in implementation. I noticed that each regional team has its own social media brand, content and sometimes platform strategy. I found that some videos have very a few clicks or views on youtube, and that in some regions the followers on Google+ are very few too. I did wonder if using social media is a good strategy — if we actually can reach our partners through email, and email apparently is more effective to deliver information and message. Or would it be possible that maybe having social media might distract the customers — that they no longer pay attention to the important information from emails? Well I guess this is a question I will discover in my future work. :)