When Facebook is a Waste of Time

by Don Harkey

Have you ever heard the phrase, 'when you get a new hammer, the whole world looks like a nail'? The current phenomena around social media might just be the newest hammer. First MySpace, then Facebook, and now Twitter... these free online applications compete with each other like celebrities on a 'reality' game show. Pundits say that social media apps will be critical for business. Are they really worth it?

Let's look at some other "hammers" of the past. The personal computer was going to revolutionize business and eliminate paper. Has it done that? The PC has certainly changed the way we do things, but not necessarily in the ways we expected 30 years ago. Some of the things we imagined (no more filing cabinets) did not come true while some things we never dreamed of (the internet) became our reality.

Another "hammer" is Six-Sigma methodology. Popularized by Motorola, GE, and then 3M, Six-Sigma's process improvement methodology became all the rage in the 1990's and even well into this decade. Did it accomplish what it set out to do? Has product quality for Six-Sigma organizations improved dramatically? One thing that has happened is an increased awareness and interest in the nature of a process. It has become "cool" to have a quality program.

The issue with any new hammer is that it is new and therefore you can't really see how you are going to use it until you try it out. You might hammer a few nails and think to yourself, "man, this is slick!". You might use it to remove a few nails and be even more impressed. Then you might use it to open a can of beans or to knock on your neighbors front door, and you might begin to see that it is not a universal tool.

The same is true for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media applications. As a business, each is a potential tool that is pretty good and specific tasks. If I am trying to reach out to new clients for my business, Facebook is probably a poor application since the only people that "see" me are already "friends". However, LinkedIn is not a bad tool for networking because you can get "introductions" from other contacts on your list. Twitter can connect you to people who are just interested in your content.

Before you get rid of your Facebook accounts, consider other applications. What if you are trying to get to know somebody and you have a client who is a "friend" on Facebook. You get to see pictures of their kids, watch their status updates, and even find out the results of their "which type of salty snack food are you?" quiz. LinkedIn has status updates, but you won't see as much movement in it.

To keep up the hammer analogy, if a hammer is useful, how useful is a whole toolkit full of tools? If you were going to build a house, you wouldn't select either a hammer or a saw, you would grab both along with many other tools. Using social media for your business is the same concept.

Think about what you are trying to accomplish and use the tools appropriately. Post a video commercial of your company on YouTube and then link to it on Twitter. Get introduced to a key contact via LinkedIn and send them a useful article from a blog (preferably that you wrote). The point is to creatively use these tools together with a purpose. Play with each tool and think about what types of things each is best at. It's not a choice between Facebook and MySpace or Twitter and LinkedIn, its more of a choice between which tools you need to make your business better.