Brian Taylor
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Getting Social
By the time you pick up this issue, hopefully spring will have arrived in your part of the country. Certainly, this has been one of the most severe and challenging winters that any of us can recall. I was lucky enough to get out of the snow and cold in Atlanta in early February to attend a magazine conference in Phoenix where, unfortunately, it wasn’t a lot warmer. Nevertheless, the conference turned out to be quite enlightening for me in a number of respects.
We are living now in the Internet/digital age, which for many is still a rather confusing time. Those of you born in the ’80s have more or less grown up with computers and the Internet. But even for those most adept and comfortable in that world, the recent phenomena of Facebook, Twitter and other social media have added a new twist for everyone, even to those who thought they had everything figured out. Are these just passing fancies or fads? Which of the recent proliferation of social media will survive the next five years? How do they fit into our business lives? Or do they?
These were all issues discussed at the conference. Honestly, I was skeptical about the impact of these on business, but I came away with a greater appreciation for the potential these tools could have in communicating valuable content nearly instantly.
Developing a community or network of customers and/or stakeholders within your dental world is the key. Pertinent content that can improve the way a dentist practices is certainly of value. The ability for a supplier to be able to reach the distribution community quickly with news of the latest and greatest in technology certainly has value, as would the ability for your company to reach you with updates and news. With the migration of being able to transmit and receive such content via mobile devices lays the groundwork necessary for these applications to work effectively.
Not to get lost in the hype of these new and sometimes confusing tools is the underlying driver of being able to distribute meaningful content to a networked community. In sales it is always about creating value in what you bring to the relationship. How valuable do you become if you are the provider of the latest study on a new technique or procedure that some of your customers were interested in?
It may not happen overnight, or indeed it may be a passing fad, but it’s worthy of your attention to at least stay tuned in to where the applications of these new tools are leading so as not to be caught napping.
Tweet, tweet!
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