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Businesses keep social networking tools at arm’s length

TEMPE — Even though she’s a young marketing rep for one of the nation’s largest and most cutting-edge universities, Alice Ho says she is still afraid to use social networking tools to spread her company’s message.

What is a “widget”? Are “applications” still something you fill out? And why would anyone want to “poke” or “karate chop” a friend through online networks such as Facebook?

“I’m 27, and sometimes I feel too old for that stuff myself,” Ho admits.

Websites that allow users to interact with each other are called social networking sites. Some business owners still feel these websites are out of their comfort zone, but others say they are the wave of the future for selling products or building an audience around them.

Amanda Vega, founder of Amanda Vega Consulting in Scottsdale, said that social media has been around for more than 10 years now, and includes a variety of different forms including blogs and social networks such as Facebook.

“There are over 250 different tools and technologies and behaviors that comprise social media as a practice,” Vega says. Business should use them as an additional marketing tool, not as the primary one. These sites should allow users to give honest feedback to products, among other things.

But many of Vega’s clients are also concerned about opening themselves up to negative feedback, and they think these comments will be placed on social networks and spread around the Internet, Vega said.

But, Vega states that marketing agencies are able to set up a type of social media that makes sense for the company they are working with. In fact, some tools have popped up recently that allow companies to manipulate search engine results so that the negative comments get driven further down into the queue, and thus, into obscurity.

The problem, Vega says, is that overly positive feedback can ruin a social networking site’s value. Indeed, ASU tends to shy away from using this tool because it can’t control the message.

“When we put a message out there [using social media], it can be interpreted differently,” Ho says.

She also fears social media is only targeting a younger demographic for businesses, and another marketing expert agrees. Jason Ferrara, CEO of Elixir Interactive in Scottsdale, says that some of his clients voice this same concern.

However, businesses need to look towards the future, and that marketing reality includes social networking.

“It’s not a fad. People are using it whether they like it or not,” Ferrara says.

Today’s children are growing up using social networks, and businesses need to react to this by focusing on their clients of tomorrow, Ferrara said.

Yet another challenge that social media faces today is corruption. In 2006, Coca-Cola created a blog for Coke Zero that was suppose to allow consumers to comment about the product. It was soon discovered that Coca-Cola employees were actually maintaining the blog.

In response to this, Ferrara said that this is not a phenomenon of social media, but rather something that we see every day in society.

The key to combating this problem is to be honest and transparent, Ferrara said.

“If you are not strongly represented, people are less likely to place business with you,” Ferrara said.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.