How “ObamaCare” Helps Your Business…or…Does Your Business Have a Social Media Strategy?

No….I’m not asking if you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a blog you post to.

A strategy. A plan. A roadmap.

I recently attending a fantastic conference in San Francisco by Useful Social Media called The Corporate Social Media Summit. A few of the panels spoke specifically to this and there were some great discussions and current case studies showing how businesses are leveraging social media for better customer service relationships. Go check out #csmsf.

How can the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (un-lovingly referred to as “ObamaCare”) help your business? What does it have to do with this blog posting and social media strategy?

Let me start with this story from my personal Facebook page today.

After the Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of this law, I posted the following on my Facebook page:

Help: where do you find good information about the current Health Care plan and Supreme Court rulling [sic] that isn’t incendiary, polarizing and full of bias?

Looking to understand.

Within minutes, I had some fantastic feedback and articles to review. There were over 25 comments related to my question and there were dozens of other’s that “liked” my post.

What I found out was some amazingly knowledgeable people who knew much more about this issue that I did, pointed me to great articles to read, of which were specific articles of our US Constitution. What I was able to learn from this crowd sourcing experiment was wonderful.

I now had links to more reading material that I was able to digest in one sitting. Law journals. US Constitutional articles. Unbiased reviews of the law (is there really such a thing?).

Bottom line: I was able to get information from a group of people who I have a higher trust (relationship, connection, etc) in help me.

So, what does this have to do with a Social Media Strategy?

Just imagine if my question was something like:

Help: Who can tell me the best businesses for XXX?

Help: I just had a horrible experience with XXXX company; has anyone else dealt with this?

Help: I hate XX company and want to warn you from doing business with them!

By the way, this is going on right now. It’s always gone on. It always will.

The question remains: does your business have a social media strategy? Do you have a plan? A roadmap?

P.S. If you interested, here’s links that were provided I found very helpful to my Facebook question:

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/krauthammer-why-john-roberts-upheld-obamacare-1.3811639

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause