Social Media and American Warehouse Systems

American Warehouse Systems has officially jumped in the deep end of the social media pool. We now have seven employees with authorized Twitter pages from sales to service to engineering. We are present on LinkedIn having both a company profile and profiles for dozens of employees. Our Facebook page is up and running and our YouTube account already has several videos. Obviously we blog (or at least attempt to). In addition to the big five we can also be found on other social media sites such as Merchant Circle, Friend Feed, Biznik, Plaxo, Fast Pitch, Stumble Upon, Digg, Picasa, Daily Booth and probably a few dozen more that I can't remember right now.

Social media hit us all like a tidal wave. With the economy as poor as it's been we've all been looking for a low cost marketing media to gain market share. Social media being all but free was there to seduce us. American Warehouse Systems like many companies heard the sirens call and headed toward...well actually it's too early to tell exactly where we are headed.

We did however establish a social media policy and amended it to our employee handbook. We feel that social media may in fact be more than a great big social time sink but we wanted to establish guidelines so every employee understands our expectations. It's best to be prepared. I would advise every company to incorporate a social media policy. I have already seen corporate litigation as a result of negative things said and promises made by employees on social media sites.

We aren't quite sure if we will ever be able to see direct sales from social media. If you believe you might, you should look down other avenues. We spend a fair amount of corporate resources just "getting out there". We feel it's important to build relationships and let our customers, potential customers and the general public know we are actually people with personalities and opinions just like them. If they are interested in material handling, great, maybe we can help them out. If they aren't, that's just fine too, most days I'd rather talk about our military and politics than pallet racking anyway. Kyle Thill our Director of Services has a fantastic blog where he discusses real world forklift issues (you can find it here http://bit.ly/726xIl ). I know many people use this blog as a resource for their own forklift or fleet. My blog on the other hand is usually about whatever I'm thinking about on Wednesday afternoon (Kyle blogs daily) which is usually one of four things; US Armed Forces, US Politics, Internet Marketing and Material Handling.

With the thought in mind that you may never see your first dollar from social media, don't forget the "old" ways you've used to market your company. Ongoing search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO/SEM) are still the biggest bang for your buck on the Internet. Email newsletter campaigns are almost as inexpensive as social media and they can help you reach your target market every day, week or month via email (although I'd discourage day). We use a very professional tele-prospecting company to make calls for us every day and we have found the ROI to be extremely high. We also do several trade shows and personal visits every year for some "face time" with customers.

It's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket and I would suggest to anyone to keep a diverse marketing strategy keying in on high ROI campaigns.

On the other hand Pepsi did cancel their Super Bowl commercials to spend $20mil on social media...