Business leaders are encouraged to build and engage communities online.
During the ICT and BPO Conference, leaders were told to bring their skills in innovation and communication in their social media campaign.
Maria Ressa, CEO and Executive Editor of Rappler, a social news network who actively engage their audience in an effort to achieve social change, said business leaders are challenged to jump into social media and adopt change.
“It is a difficult, more complex world we are in now. But we are more interconnected than we have ever been. Every single business at this point is caught between jumping into something where we can do better or risk being a dinosaur,” Ressa said.
Since people are more engaged in social media, it is easy to track the social behavior of the people rather than in surveys which do not monitor the actual behaviors of the people.
Quoting on some psychologists she met, she said 80 percent of the people’s decisions are based on their emotions.
However the challenge to keep people from getting engaged in each social community is to offer something relevant, interactive, innovative, and “relatable”. It must focus on your strength as an organization.
Janette Toral of DigitalFilipino.com said maintaining a social media requires a lot of passion and good story telling technique.
“It forces you to be innovative in your approach. You have to show that you have passion and be able to communicate how fascinating you are. You should share something new otherwise it will bore them. Followers should identify themselves in you and make them proud that they follow you or are reading you,” Toral said.
Maintaining a social media is so powerful in such a way that each business can reach out to their target audience without having to spend a lot in traditional media and surveys.
“You can bypass media rules and reach your own market,” Ressa said.
A lot are changing including transformation created because of the Internet and there is a lot of other reasons why businesses should consider online strategies.
In the Philippines one-third of the total population have access to the Internet which means at least 350 million are connected in the world wide web. She said that of these people seven percent are accessing the Internet from the Internet cafes.