Opinion: Why Trucking Should Adopt Social Media

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

By Dick Hyatt
President
Decisiv Inc.

Social media is transforming the way America does business, and there’s no reason that shouldn’t include trucking. When it comes to traditional trucking products such as vehicles, systems and components, the development life cycle can be fairly long. The time span required from initial concept through design, research and development and testing before production can begin, can be measured in years. Information-management technology, on the other hand, often has a much shorter development life.

What that means for those of us who supply the advanced technologies used to manage trucking companies today is that our objective has to be communicating more effectively with our customers and partners.

Traditionally, we have employed such practices as focus groups to accomplish this task, and while they yielded results, these groups were expensive, time-consuming and static.

Fixed in time, they simply could not address technology issues and customer and partner challenges in an effective and beneficial time frame.

But today, many trucking companies and industry suppliers of all types of technologies are successfully using social media communication channels such as blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to meet almost immediately the challenges and needs of customers and partners.