You are here: Home / Archives for social media best practices
Jun 27

Why Do Corporations Struggle with Social Media?

June 27, 2010 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I see a lot of larger companies who don’t seem to get how social media makes things cheaper and well, just better. It’s a direct communication tool, like a cell phone. Big companies seem to just snuggle with Web 2.0 rockstars and then call it a day. That’s lame. That doesn’t make me want to throw you my money. I just want to know that you aren’t going to hose me or my friends and then we are cool.

Here are some tips for large companies on how they can cut costs, improve their products, and well, make the world a better place by using social media:

1.) It sounds harsh, but evolve or die.
Look folks, I’m not making this stuff up. Social media and in particular Facebook is a global revolution. Imagine a country that grows to 400 million people in six years. That’s Facebook. Twitter was founded in 2006, and studies show that 37 percent of journalists already use it. 59 percent of them already blog.

Yes, it sprung up on you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take it seriously. If 37 percent of journalists are on Twitter, how easy is it for pissed off customers to hit them up with a juicy story about your company?

What am I saying here? It means 1.) Your communications people need to do their homework, 2.) Your senior leadership needs to do their homework, and 3.) You need to come up with a plan and a budget, and you need to revisit them frequently. Don’t just ignore it because the word “Twitter” sounds kind of dirty.

2.) Social media is not a marketing tool. It can be used by your entire company.
Social media tools like Twitter are merely communication tools. When I advise people about them, I use a term from the movie “The Matrix”:
There is no spoon.

This means you can use Vimeo not just to spam people with ads, but to instruct them how to use your product. You can use Twitter to follow potential business development opportunities or get feedback for your product teams. There really is no rigid “use” for social media. If you give it to the marketing team, you are essentially telling the world, “The only way we would like to communicate with you is to sell you something”. I suppose that’s within a company’s right, but there are many more useful ways to use social media to cut costs and make things happen in a short period of time.

3.) You are playing with fire when you outsource it to someone else.
Your customers are going to ask you all sorts of things.
Can I get a job at your company?
Fix this issue or I’m calling my lawyer.
Why hasn’t this tech support rep answered my email?

Can you really trust some 24-year-old at a marketing agency will get a tweet from a journalist or a very angry customer and is going to represent your company in a way that doesn’t get you in trouble with the SEC or the press? I don’t really understand this model of using social media. I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. Agencies can create good marketing campaigns using social media and can provide guidance for sure (see this and this), but they shouldn’t really represent your company’s presence online.

Again, trusting it just to the marketers means you are missing other opportunities to save money, like using these tools for tech support or product development.

4.) You let the lawyers take control even though they think “blog” is a drink you have on Christmas.
People seem to think lawyers know everything about the law. Here’s a secret: THEY DON’T. The law is very expansive and constantly changes. No lawyer knows everything about it and if they do, they are just big lying liars.

Lawyers should not be able to set policies on tweeting and blogging if they don’t have any familiarity with the mediums and in particular, the concept of Creative Commons. It just makes employees nervous and distrustful and then they do their own thing on the side anyway. Just like senior leadership should do due diligence to learn about social media, so should the legal department.

5.) People aren’t convenient numbers. They are people. Now they can form a “corporation” of their own, for you or against you.
This is perhaps the point where big companies struggle the most. You’ve got the bean counters who expect certain amounts of leads, profits, etc, whatever. They are used to a Cold War game, where you just outgun your opponent with huge shock and awe figures.

The game has changed. This is not a trend. This isn’t a fad. That game is gone and lost forever.

What the Cold War mentality isn’t considering in a new media world is that these numbers can all ban together and decide you rock. They can ban together and decide you suck. They now have easy access to each other. You can’t just hose a bunch of people and think they don’t know any better. It’s not the way it used to be. They are all talking about your company and comparing notes.

In a new media world, you just have to be honest and reduce your risk for IEDs, snipers, and the like. You have to win the hearts and minds of people and then ask them to spread the word.

It’s not that corporations can’t be agile enough–it’s that often the people in charge simply don’t get it. They didn’t get where they are at using it so there is no use dropping what works for some “fad”. A little research and a holistic strategy about social media could mean wonders for them. I don’t how you can look at social media tools and figure that consumers will ever stop using them to reach out to each other. They just help people make informed decisions.

Frustrated because your company fits this bill? Leave a comment for how big companies can improve what they are doing. You can use a fake name like Awesome McAwesomePants or something outrageously cool like that so as to not incriminate yourself.

View Comments
Nov 23

You Just Can’t Hide: YouTube and the Police on the BART

November 23, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I caught this video of a BART police officer slamming a drunk man’s face into a window from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Twitter feed:

While I understand that police work is extremely stressful and often requires officers to make life and death situations that I will rarely make in my lifetime, this looks like a scene from a bad action flick. I’m glad BART officials have decided to investigate.

This video was shot on a cell phone video camera. It goes to show you that you are never in control of your message unless you decide to operate in a complete vacuum, which will never happen.

There are so many blogs about how to use social media to promote your business. There seem to be more experts everyday. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be social media experts. There would be “here’s how to make your customers rock with your product” experts. A social media expert isn’t going to teach your organization to care about what they do everyday.

This video is an example of someone caught in a rough situation who did the wrong thing. The BART officials could have put everyone on Twitter, taught them best practices, and this still could have happened.

Care about the people you deal with every day. Sympathize with what they are going through. Nothing will weather the storm of social media better than understanding the human condition.

View Comments
Aug 26

Is Your Company’s Social Media Campaign Merely Gilded?

August 26, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

rottensocialmedia
When we think of the poster child for social media, we think of Zappos. The online department store (yes, it’s beyond shoes) puts all of their employees on Twitter and openly shows off its culture online. Apparently it paid off, because it caught the attention of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who bought Zappos for $928 million.

I’m not a Zappos customer, but I do applaud them for putting their employees on Twitter. Why? Because if I buy something from them, I know I’m not supporting a dysfunctional company that has one person who actually bothers with Facebook and Twitter and 100 people who are miserable because their boss doesn’t respect them.

While I would actually handle their campaign a bit differently by actually accentuating the fun of buying new clothes and shoes and hiring people who understand this, there is no argument: it is easy to wrap your head around what kind of company Zappos is. When we enter a business and see a bunch of miserable teenagers who don’t care to answer our questions, we assume the owner has no pride in his or her business. When we walk in and see a bunch of people who are passionate about what they do, it tends to rub off on us. We focus on the quality of goods and services versus just the price.

The online space is no different. When we see a company Twitter page, we assume they went to some social media seminar or saw it on CNN and decided to give it a whirl. We don’t assume that a company is ethical or actually has good products. When we see that other employees happily use their Twitter feeds and associates their online identity with the company, we can get a clearer picture about how that company works.

Mark my words: the companies that see the greatest ROI by using social media will be the ones who focus on providing the best service instead of getting the most followers or being seen standing next to Jeremiah Owyang. We don’t care if you are social media famous– we care if we get value by using your goods and services. By listening and valuing our customers whether it’s via social media, the phone, or in person, we can foster sustainable brands that will always survive in the future.

View Comments