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Social media: Connect first

Ray Allegrezza -- Furniture Today, April 6, 2011

e-urban legend? Without a doubt, social media is still the online darling of peer-to-peer communications. According to some online observers, sites such as Facebook and Twitter are also the new e-tools to help you sell your products online.

But is that premise the real deal or the latest e-urban legend? I think that depends on whether your goal is to break down the door to online sales with these platforms or to use them to gently open the door to conversations about your company, its values and oh yeah, your products.

Lots of us initially got on the social networking bus because the price was right. Since Facebook and Twitter are free, why not test their ability to drive your company‘s business?

But before find yourself dropped off at Disappointment Drive, keep in mind that social media were designed with the primary goal of creating connectivity between community users. While I'm not saying that you can't use social networking to sell, you need to use these platforms to sell you and your store first.

I just got back from a terrific educational summit hosted by Myriad Software. Not surprisingly, one topic was a social media roundtable.

Earlier in the program, David Lively of Grey Suit Retail, a division of The Lively Merchant, set the stage by announcing that "we've not found any evidence of Twitter leading to retail sales."

Later, some of the retailers participating in the roundtable said they actually had sold product as the result of a tweet on Twitter, or a post on Facebook, but confirmed that those sales came only after they had used these platforms to first develop a relationship with online consumers.

Specifically, the retailers said that before they ever asked the customer for an order, they gave visitors to their sites value-added information in the form of free design advice, "first looks" at new products and e-newsletters with updates on the store, in-store events and more.

Technology is changing how we do business, but it won't change the fact that this is still a relationship business.

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