And succeeds, it would appear. Laurel points to Toyota’s Greek blogging experiment.
The money quote in her post:
…bloggers only allegiance is to their passion and their conscience. So if your car (product/service) sucks, a magazine might be ‘even handed’ in their review. After all, you also pay for advertising, and they want to be invited to press events again. Bloggers will simply say it sucks and lists the reasons why. And that is the crux of the matter – why people trust social media and complete strangers to ‘expert testimony’ and ‘trained journalism’.
I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of webbies who work for NGOs last night down the pub and we were chatting about social media. One of the folks mentioned that a friend works for an broadband internet service provider and spent an enormous amount of time responding to a few critical voices in discussion groups and blogs – defending his company essentially.
My first question was “is the criticism he’s defending against valid?” Social media is not a particularly good idea if what you’re actually doing/offering is not very good or unethical.
But, the point was well taken – tracking and engaging in social media can be very time consuming, and it’s important to evaluate where to invest your energy (and when to just protect your brand).
I’d like to actually start to put together some thoughts on when social media is a good idea, when it’s not, and what sort of resources are required. But in the meantime, Priscilla recently posted a great method of evaluating which social media tools might work best for your organisation. (And then takes her own advice to great effect.)
2 Comments...
Thanks for the hat tip
In response, I have to say that LOTS of resources are required. An organisation can’t simply implement something … they need to employ somebody to maintain it. That person needs to be good at connecting with people both online and offline.
These are real relationships you’re building when you use online social networking tools. You don’t want people to forget about your organisation once the buzz has died down, because you’ve put lots of work (and money) into building relationships with those people.
I think lots of organisations put resources into establishing something great but forget about the maintenance effort that is required.
I agree – maintaining a social media initiative in the long-term is tough, and does require a specific set of skills. But personally I think the benefits can be worth it – but shouldn’t be approached lightly.