He has spent two decades leading social media projects and was BBC head of blogging. Robin Hamman talks to us about social media sites changing the business world Robin Hamman talks to us about social media sites changing the business world.

How can firms create more business through social websites?~
One way is to harness the power of social media tools and services to reach out to, and engage with, audiences and stakeholders. But in order to do this, organisations first need to understand how to find interested parties online, acknowledge any concerns they might have, engage with them and entice them to get involved.

In my presentation, I’ll provide a mix of theoretical discussion and practical tips to help organisations, companies and brands do exactly this.

Do you think a lot of businesses, particularly SMEs, are keen to make social media tools work for them but just don’t know how?
Businesses of all sizes can and are trying to understand how they might use social media tools.

The great thing about these tools is that, so long as those businesses don’t get things horribly wrong and damage their brands in the process – something that Habitat learned when they used the hashtag #iranelection on Twitter to draw users to their posts – experimentation can be done with little or no cost.

How can firms use these tools to battle through the recession?
Social media offer a number of benefits over traditional advertising and marketing channels. Many companies think of their website as the be all and end all of their web presence. This is shortsighted.

A piece of content posted to a corporate website is likely to only be seen by people who are already familiar with the brand, and would have visited the site whether that particular content was there or not. This method does little, if anything, to reach out to new audiences.

By taking that same piece of content, for example an image, and putting it on a social content sharing site such as Flickr, tagging it so people can find it, then linking back to your corporate website, you’re much more likely to reach out to new audiences who have never heard of you.

The Mara Triangle rangers have done this wonderfully well, putting images of wildlife on Flickr, setting up Facebook pages to discuss their work, posting videos to Youtube and responding to queries on Twitter – with all of it linking back to their blog where people can donate to help fund anti-poaching activities.

Are there any other benefits?
It often enables organisations to more closely target specific demographics or audiences as opposed to firing a message out to the masses and hoping they’ll hit the right people.

I first encountered highly targeted advertising on a social network when I worked at the BBC, in the White City Media Village in west London, and saw an advertisement for the dentist who worked out of the very building I worked in.

At first that shocked me a bit – Facebook was actually able to sell ads in a highly targeted way – but then I realised that, because it was so highly targeted, it was actually far more relevant to me than the ads I see on other sites.

In recent years have you noticed a shift in the attitude of businesses towards sites such as Facebook from scepticism to acceptance?
People of all ages are now using social media tools, and for all sorts of reasons.

Younger people probably have more opportunities to maintain their social networks than older people, simply because they’re less likely to have networks that have, over time, grown and become more distributed. Tools such as Twitter and Facebook are great at helping people maintain existing social ties, and allow people to do so in a way that is less intensive than the old way – every so often having to write an email or make a call to each individual you want to keep in touch with.

I don’t find it surprising at all that younger people, whose social lives are the centre of their lives, as well as older people, who find that social networking tools make it easier to maintain existing relationships over distance and time, are all embracing the use of sites like Twitter, Facebook and others.