No one is surprised today that social media is literally everywhere. If your business is not thinking about and tackling this issue, odds are you are struggling. While we can laugh at Millennials and GenZ about their obsession with their phones and social media, I don’t think any of the rest of us are any different. I am proudly GenX but on more than one occasion just this week I have chosen where to eat based on an Instagram post (that ramen bowl at Big Hammock was almost as good at the picture!
We get our news, current events, latest happenings, restaurant updates, etc. all from social media. More than likely, your business needs to have a specific and deliberate effort on how to make this incredibly medium work for you. The CEP recently hosted a forum on social media use and one of the three big takeaways – your social media communication needs to be purposeful. Just throwing a lot of posts up will not drive opportunity. In fact, it will probably drive away your audience. At the CEP, we are constantly refining our strategy to ensure that we are being very purposeful with our posts and tweets.
Another key takeaway is that your communication needs to be genuine. We have all read and seen that company who simply tried too hard. It is awkward to read and you learn to just flip past it. If your company is not young and urban, please do not post as if you are! Your audience will recognize fairly quickly when a company is not being genuine.
Related to that is staying on mission. Be who you are and stick with it. It can be easy to find your accounts drifting into issues (serious and trivial alike) which are not core to your organization’s mission. I hope more than anything else the CEP is committed to staying on mission. We want to communicate information and stories which provide a return on investment for our partners and assist in our effort to create and retain jobs in this community. Anything else will only take away.
Final 3
The CEP was extremely honored to again be a finalist for national Chamber of the Year. This award, presented annually by the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, is the highest recognition in our industry. The CEP has been a finalist two of the last three years. Our fellow finalists both times have been two of our benchmark cities. This means we are consistently comparing both the growth of our community and the success of the CEP against the best. While we were disappointed not bring home the “big” trophy, we are extremely proud to again be among the final three. As a bonus, our great friends at the Asheville Chamber were this year’s recipient and they will host us next April for our next inter-city visit – Quest 2020. Registration for this incredible learning and networking experience is now live.
