Comments on: Social Media Survives Budget Slashing at Many Companies… Why?

By: Blue Collar Rocket Science › Honored by MCDM’s “Flip the Media”

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:45:09 +0000

[...] Further, I was the only author to have two posts in the “best of” list, as my post Social Media Survives Budget Slashing at Many Companies… Why? came in at position number [...]

By: Sophia Agtarap

Sophia Agtarap — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:27:56 +0000

We’re talking about this very thing in higher education: how to do more with less. Departments aren’t able to attend all the recruitment fairs they once were. Staff are being laid off, all the while, universities still need to recruit top students. One solution is harnessing Web 2.0 and social media for both recruitment, student retention, then engagement as an alum. As more people adopt social media into their standard operating procedures, both students and institutions of higher education are seeing that there are ways to engage throughout the cycle, from recruitment to alumni and donor cultivation.

By: Amy Rolph

Amy Rolph — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:17:02 +0000

This is a really interesting study, and it seems to point to two things. Social media is inexpensive from an advertising perspective and therefore worth experimenting with. But maintaining these efforts also speaks to a company’s desire to meet and interact with clients on their home turf, so to speak. The way people interact with one another has changed drastically over the last decade, and consumer tastes have followed suit. I certainly see the same overtones in my own industry. The New York Times announced 100-job newsroom reduction this week, but the paper is still hiring software developers.

By: Sara Niegowski

Sara Niegowski — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:30:01 +0000

When companies say they plan to NOT scale back on social-media spending, I wonder if that is because they have not spent much to implement these strategies initially. In my organization, we cut our operations budget by $5 million and more than 4-percent of our employees this year. There was no reduction in social media endeavors, however, because the communication employees were expected to adapt and grow their job function to keep current with the most effective tools. The organization incurred no additional cost since the social media outlets we use, such as FaceBook and Twitter, are free. My workload has increased, meaning that I’m looking to decrease efforts with less effective (and more expensive) tools, such as print newsletters. Therefore—for me—it would be interesting to know if the companies that are not planning to scale back on social-media spending are instead reducing their communication efforts in other communications methods—and, if so, what are those other methods?

By: LADunkin

LADunkin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:48:40 +0000

I just found this article related to the topic:
The evolving face of social networks
Laura Parker: What can evolutionary graph theory teach us about the spread of ideas on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/07/facebook-social-networks-evolutionary-graph-theory

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:03:51 +0000

In my experience as a technical communicator within a large company, several factors impact the slow adoption of social media as a norm. The pace of product development is fast and teams are cut back to the bone– carving out time to change a communication paradigm and train employees within tight, overlapping schedules is a challenge (this is huge). Secondly, there is pressure to quantify the value of technical communication efforts, which as you point out, is not a measurement technique anyone has mastered. I do see innovators pushing forward with social media outreach efforts nonetheless, and as their value becomes more measurable, they are likely to become more the norm.

By: LADunkin

LADunkin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:00:05 +0000

Brook, another good post. I think you nailed it down when you said “…a way to measure what simple communication is worth. If the return on talking with customers can ever be quantified, it will provide great benefits for companies and social media experts alike.” If only we had an algorithm that would calculate the value of communication between two people and then apply it to an entire network of people. We know that communication is valuable, not just in terms of trying to monetize it, but in everyday life, like communication in a marriage, communication in foreign affairs, or communication in a business meeting. However to be able to to put a number on the value would greatly help the social media world.
Now if we could only get a mathematician to develop an algorithm like Dijkstra’s algorithm that solves the shortest path problem or Prim’s algorithm that solves the minimum spanning tree problem in graph theory. We need something that will take into consideration the social graph and the weighted values of the edges of the graph to formulate an overall value for the communication between two or more people. I guess though before the result of the algorithm would be something of use, a determination of what constitutes the value of the edges would need to be decided. Meaning, what does the value between Node A and Node B mean? What makes a communication path between me and Brook more or less valuable than between me and Hanson? And then all the degrees of separation. So in terms of Dijkstra or Prim instead of looking for the shortest path or the minimum spanning tree would we be looking for the longest path or the maximum span since it would be better to have a higher weight associated with the edges. I have no idea if algorithms like this can be applied to the communication valuation problem, but it seems that there has to be a way to use graph theory to solve the problem.