10:53 a.m. - 2010-07-22
Social Media Mistakes To Avoid
Of late, an admirer of mine has grilled me having a few inquiries in regards to the social media strategy that his company was planning on implementing. The corporation is in the business of designing software for {telephone| businesses, and while I won't mention the name of the corporation out of politeness, I'll let you know this; they had quite a bit to learn about their social media profit formula.
Their plan was to make an organization blog to engage their clients, and add importance to their website. Which is usually a pretty good start; a blog works well for both of these things. However, the corporation was very paranoid that their competition would start to take ideas from them due to what information was transmitted through the blog and decided that every article needed to be approved through the head of the company before it could get posted. Another problem was that the blog content could not discuss any of the company's products or services, once more since they had been fearful that their opposition would take their ideas. But, they had made their blog. Thats a lot more than the majority companies were doing.
Unfortunately, the blog was doomed headed for failure. Though they did need to start blogging, and had plans to develop a complimentary existence on Twitter, the blog posts would only be visible to visitors who were already clients of the corporation. Which begs the question, what were they planning to tweet about?. Since every reader of the site has to be a client first so that they can access the content pieces, what would be the purpose of alerting the Twittersphere about up-to-the-minute posts, or bringing people back to their blog to start a dialogue, if only the people youve already sold to can get into it? How do you think you're going to entice customers into a discussion of your services if you cannot discuss your products? Lastly, if its a private blog, why are you so concerned concerning the competition gaining access to it?
In essence, this company is hopping on the Social Media bandwagon without thinking it through. Possibly they do suffer a legitimate security concern, when that is the reason then a channel that's all about the sharing of information and ideas almost certainly is not the right fit for them. I have been blogging for this little flower shop here in Houston for a little more than a year, and if I had to express the single principal lesson I've learned while doing it, it would be this; "the greater you communicate, the more you get back". Where corporations like this flop at Social Media is leaping in head first devoid of taking some time to develop a strategy that enhances their business. Without taking a candid look at your online business, then developing a Social Media strategy that works for it, it's going to be akin to attempting to explain to guys how females think. An exercise in pointlessness.
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