Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: It's Time for Social Media

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...Okay, all of you social media Luddites, it’s time to give it up. It’s time to get off of your butts and start learning about social media. You’ve waited long enough and you’ve thrown up enough gorilla dust to confuse us about the depth and breadth of the your knowledge...or lack thereof. Until now, you’ve gotten away with it, but now the jig is up, and the day of reckoning has come. It’s time for you to join the twenty-first century and find out what social media is really all about.

A guy in New Hampshire posted a story on his Facebook page about his dying grandmother wanting some soup--some good old New England clam chowder--but he knew that Panera Bread only sells chowder on Fridays. It wasn’t Friday, so he called up his local Panera and explained the situation. The manager told him that they would absolutely make some clam chowder for his grandmother, and that he should come pick it up. When he got there, they gave him a box of cookies as well. He ended the post by writing, “It’s not that big a deal to most, but to my grandmother it meant a lot. I really want to thank Sue and the rest of the staff from Panera in Nashua, NH, for making my grandmother happy. Thank you so much!”

That post got 800,000 likes and that store’s sales went up 28% right after that and 34% the quarter after that.

And that, ladies a gentlemen, is what social media is all about.

Through social media, all of your actions and activities--both good and bad--are amplified to the entire world.

When that bastion of bureaucratic banking Bank of America increased its fees a few years ago, the whole country was soon in an uproar. Through social media, enough pressure was placed on BoA that they changed their policies and got rid of the fees.

Southwest Airlines gave Kevin Smith the boot for being "too fat" and he got back at them in the worst way. The good part of this story is that Southwest, being the savvy and customer-focused company that they are, atoned for their sins, said their mea culpas, and made it right--redeeming themselves very loudly and publicly.

Southwest's story is quite unlike the world’s worst airline whose baggage handlers completely destroyed a young man’s guitar by throwing it around the tarmac before shoving it into the under-plane baggage department. The young man tried to work it out with United, but the company wouldn’t give him the time of day. Oh, after giving him that old well-practiced airline runaround they did offer him a payment of $100--not bad for a $3,500.00 guitar. So this young man and his friends made a YouTube video titled United Breaks Guitars. So far, over 14 million folks have seen that video. And the young man even wrote a song about the incident and that went viral as well. Just think of the staggering amount of money United has spent on advertising trying to overcome the image that’s been created by 14 million pairs of eyeballs viewing that video.

It's a whole new world, and if you want to survive you must understand not only what social media is, but how it works. You’re going to have to learn how to blog, how to Tweet, and how to use Pinterest and Instagram and whatever else is coming our way. It’s time you stop pretending this is a fad, or it’s a fad just for kids, or that it’s only something that high-tech companies in Silicon Valley are using. You must learn about this new phenomena and incorporate it into your business plan.

I know you’re making your plans for 2015, aren't you? Of course you are--at least if you know what’s good for you and your company. This year why not get with it? Why not start incorporating social media into your strategic plan? It will be the most important thing you can do.

Here’s a tip for you if you want to fast-track your way to becoming a social media maven: Pick up A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive, by Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt. It’s a great book. I just finished reading it and enjoyed it immensely. Actually, the stories in this week’s column all came from this book. Pick it up, read it, learn from it, and join the modern world. It’s only common sense.