Do you have time to be social?

There is no longer any doubt that the Web has fundamentally changed in the past few years. The ingenuity and popularity of web applications which encourage online interaction has ushered in change. The Web has shifted from being a Web of information to a Web of participation — also known as Web 2.0. Instead of simply enabling their customers with information, customers now expect businesses to engage with them online.

There are plenty of stories of businesses that have created social networking profiles, displayed a flurry of activity for the first couple of weeks, and then, when they didn’t get instant results, abandoned those profiles. Just as it takes time to develop social relationships with new friends, so, too, does it take time to develop business relationships with new customers.

When looked at more closely, these two kinds of relationships are not all that different. If someone has a positive experience with another person, they’re more likely to trust them. The same goes for brands. Plus, the stronger the bond to that brand that a customer feels, the more forgiving they’ll be when something negative happens.

If a business has a Twitter account, followers expect more than just a repetitive blaring of the business’s latest marketing slogan and links to the latest blog post or promotional microsite. Instead Twitter users want to see genuine interaction and are likely to reward it. In Brisbane, local users changed the locations of their regular coffee “tweetups” (Twitter vernacular for a get together) when two local coffee shops created Twitter profiles and actively engaged with Brisbane users. A bar that has recently joined Twitter is also interacting with Brisbane users, who have since started holding events there as a result of the bar manager’s willingness to join the conversation and participate online.

Similar stories exist for businesses engaging with users through MySpace, Facebook and other websites with a focus on online interaction. The key point is that businesses are taking the time to interact with individual customers on their level, on their own terms and on the websites they prefer to visit. Interaction like this, however, does take time.

Being part of the new participatory Web takes just that: participation. To successfully engage with users online, a business must be willing to dedicate resources to creating and nurturing relationships with customers online. The question isn’t really “do you have time to be social?” but “can you afford to be anti-social?”