How to overcome your boss’ objections to using Social Media

In the last post, we talked about some ideas for selling your boss on why your company or organization should use social media.  But if you are having to ‘sell’ the boss on social media, that probably means she is skeptical, and probably has a set list of reasons why she does NOT think social media is a good option.  You need to address those concerns head on, and here’s how to tackle the objections you are most likely to hear:

1 – We don’t have time for social media. Social media is a big time requirement, but most companies don’t have to start from zero.  Often, you can take existing content and repurpose it for your blog or even Twitter and Facebook presences.  For example, if you have any whitepapers, or articles, or interviews, or even videos that you’ve created, these can be used as content sources for your social media efforts.

2 – Social media wouldn’t work for us, since no one is talking about us online. This is a big misconception that many companies have, especially smaller ones.  If no one is talking about your company online, that is often a POSITIVE, not a negative!

Think about it, if you are a big brand, then part of your social media efforts involve monitoring and responding to hundreds if not thousands of daily brand mentions online.  So that big brand is having to REACT to an EXISTING conversation that it’s customers are creating about and around the brand.

But a smaller company that doesn’t have any online mentions can CREATE the online conversation about them.  They don’t have to react to the conversation that their customers are creating.  So while the big brand is responding to and attempting to reframe the existing conversation, the smaller company has the advantage that they are the ones creating that conversation.

3 – Our current marketing efforts are just fine. If done smartly, your current marketing efforts, especially online, can be enhanced by social media.  For example, a blog can help drive qualified traffic to your website, which can increase sales, as we discussed in the last post.  Also, content you create for your blog can help provide inspiration and content for your email newsletter.

4 – We don’t know what to do or which tools to use. Here’s where you will need to do a bit of research, but you can often take your cues from how your current and potential customers are using social media.  If they are mostly on Twitter, then it’s a good indication that make your company should have a presence there as well.  And once you launch your social media efforts, as you are monitoring your online mention, you can track WHERE these mentions are happening.  Are they coming from blogging customers, or maybe message boards?  This gives you a great idea of which tools you should be using, and where you should be spending your time.

5 – Social media is just a fad. Social media has been around for 20 years, at least.  Even in the late 1980s, I was creating content on message boards on local BBSes, then in the 90s on online services such as Prodigy and AOL.  I think the main difference in the current version of these tools and sites is that it’s now easier than ever for individuals to create content, and it can be on their own site (blog) or even pull content from a centralized site (Twitter) to their site, via widgets.

As more customers get more advanced smartphones, these social media tools are following the phone, which means customers now have the ability to create content on the go.  Such as quickly taking a picture and immediately posting it to Twitter or their blog.  So social media has been around for a while, and isn’t going away any time soon.

So there are some ideas for countering possible objections to social media that your boss might offer.  If you have a specific question about how your company can convince your boss to use social media, either leave a comment for all of us, or email me and I will be happy to help!