Give your business its own social network

A car repair shop, for instance, could run forums where owners can discuss problems and their vehicles rather than moving that social activity to Facebook or elsewhere. PICTURE /FILE

For a many businesses, the internet has been amazing. It provides access to massive audiences, removes the tyranny of distance (and geography) and makes business processes like payments much easier.

It's cheap too, with the cost of sales and marketing dropping every year thanks to the enormous economies of scale that only the internet, that some 3.7 billion people worldwide connect to, can offer.

The internet's changing though, and while your business can still enjoy the above benefits and more, they come at a cost, namely losing control over your operation.
That's because the customers you're after will be on someone else's massive platform on which you have little or no say on how things are done.

For instance, would you put your company ads and marketing next to anti-semitic and homophobic extremist rants? No? Well, that's what YouTube did, probably not because meant to do that, but because the computer algorithm didn't see any problems with it.

Customers of McDonalds, British retail giants Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer did have major problems with it, wondering why such well-known brands would support hateful extremists.

Likewise, running a business with a Facebook storefront is convenient, but it means the social network will collect a huge amount of data on your customers which you might not want it to have.

Facebook is spilling over into every aspect of society and business as it grows ever larger.

It's offering communications tools like Messenger and Whatsapp, advertising of course, builds data centre hardware and dabbles with providing internet connections even.

Depending on your business, if it's high volume enough, the social platform you're on could copy it and compete against you, in which case your operation will be dead in the water.

The enormous power social media companies wield worries even huge superstar corporations like Apple, for the above reasons.

Luckily for Apple, Facebook's phone was a total fiasco but the two companies aren't exactly comfortable with each other; if Apple could figure out how to make a social network that people would use, it would. So far Apple's social efforts like iTunes Ping have died quietly but you can bet Cupertino won't give up on the concept, not with the Facebook juggernaut in the rear-view mirror.

That's also what your business should do, as part of its marketing strategy: build a social network.

Don't give your customers to Facebook or someone else, create a space for them instead. For instance, a car repair shop could run forums where owners can discuss problems and their vehicles rather than moving that social activity to Facebook or elsewhere.

It's definitely more work, but there are companies that can do it for you.

The social network you build will add to your business value, and you'll have control over it.

Being the minutest minnow inside social media giants will come back and bite you at some point, and you're handing over business value to a faceless corporation that doesn't care if you live or die.

They just want the volume, nothing else.

The internet was built on the principle that the more connections there are, the greater the value.

That's still true, so don't give those connections and the value they bring to somebody else.