Social media best practice

October 1, 2008 | 6 comments | Tweet This

twitter-brand

I have been tagged by Neil in the `Best practices in Social Media‘ meme (thanks Neil).  As Neil quite rightly points out, Social Media is not a channel but an approach.  A channel insinuates a one to one dialiogue which granted, many companies who enter the world of social media do try this approach.  Have a look at some brands Twitter profiles.  Notice how many have a lot of users following their updates but don’t actually follow user updates themselves?  This is a prime example of not understanding the game before joining in.  Don’t you rember trying to do that when you were at school?  The other kids didn’t want you to join in did they? Do you see where i’m going with this?  My best practice: Understand the medium before forcing your way in uninvited.

Posted by Jamie Coomber | Filed Under Blog, Brand, Social Interaction, Thought pieces  | 6 comments | Tweet This

Comments

6 Responses to “Social media best practice”

  1. Nick Clarke on October 1st, 2008 14:57

    Such a common problem in the misunderstanding of Social Media and well articulated. Good piece.

  2. fran on October 1st, 2008 20:15

    I like where you are going with this. In the old days I tried with a couple of clients to participate in newsgroups discussions (proto-social media?). We listened to the communities for months, understood their inner workings, and then finally posted for the first time. We had good reception at the beginning, but in the long run we came to realize that we weren’t quick enough: every post had to be agreed within the corporate hierarchy, approved, amended…bu the time we werr ready to speak the discussion had moved on.My point? Well even if those brands took the time to understand Twitter, do you think that they would have the capacity and speed to participate in it and would they keep it up in the long run?

  3. Jamie Coomber on October 2nd, 2008 13:49

    That’s a really good question Fra, and in my opinion they way that companies will stay ahead within this space is to hire people who already exist within these spaces to push these messages out which is a role in itself. Companies now need to hire people who will spend their time engaging with others in these spaces and occasionally feed in information of the brand, similar to what James Whatley does for Spinvox (see previous post) and similar to my role at Profero. It does require paying that salary before seeing results however, and at the moment most companies are too short sighted to understand the benefits which is why they feel they can take it upon themselves simply to be `present’ in these spaces.

  4. fran on October 3rd, 2008 16:31

    Agree, in part. You could approach this two ways.
    On the one hand you can hire people who are influential in a social media context to ‘promote’ your brand online. On the other you can influence these people to do the same without paying them.
    The first approach is in many ways a sponsorship approach. A bit like having Sean Connery wear Omega in 007.
    The second approach is a PR exercise: you build a relationship with people who have kudos in a social media context but you don’t pay them.
    The sponsorship approach imho wouldn’t work, because whatever the sponsored person says about your brand, it would have to be ‘approved, amended ..’ and it would sound fake.
    The PR approach IMHO is more interesting. Here a guy who does it, very credibly, for a living: http://sonofgeektalk.wordpress.com/
    you two might want to hook up one day. ciao

  5. mikezed on October 13th, 2008 8:16

    Without wanting to be too negative, isn’t this more about what companies are trying to get out of social media, and optimising resource, rather than “best practice” - a fair number of brands have started using Twitter as a broadcast channel for news, comments etc. Interestingly, people are happy to “follow” them on that basis, not expecting the reciprocity. It may well be that someone like WiredNews is indeed tracking mentions of the brand within Twitter, but it’s doing in through a media monitoring tool, rather than trying to track people who follow it - especially as most of the comments are likely to be completely unrelated to them. This means they can pick up on stuff that matters to them, rather than trawl through lots of other stuff.

    It’s interesting to see how technologies are adapted and moulded to suit different needs - whilst it may not be Twitter “best practice”, it certainly adds an additional channel to get the message out to an audience.

  6. ana on November 10th, 2008 17:35

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    this post of yours reminded me about the “project 100″, http://theproject100.wordpress.com/ , and thought that you would be a great contributor. the deadline for 400 word article submissions is Nov. 15. If interested, you can contact Jeff Casswell, caswellj196@gmail.com

    ana

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