Recently I came across a blog about social media. The discussion was about social media being a marketing issue or something that concerns a whole company. The outcome of the discussion was that you need to be a social company to be able to make social media work. I don’t know. Depends on what you want to use social media for.
Anti-social
Social media is not about being social in the sense of showing good social behaviour. The social thing about social media is that everybody can join. It’s open for everybody and everybody with a computer and internet access can use it. We can even say that part of what is going on in social media is not good social behaviour at all. There are weblogs, forums and discussion boards where people discriminate, threaten and abuse. Not much social about that.
Attention
Most companies still primarily use social media to get attention for their products or services. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you limit yourself to permission marketing. And as a company there is not a big chance you will start discriminating, threaten or abuse. So no problem. Social media will work for you and you don’t have to be very social too.
Backfire
It gets tricky when you start using social media to propagate your company as being a social company. In that case you have to be very careful. Because as soon somebody finds out that what you say is not what you do, you can get in serious trouble. Then your social media efforts will backfire.
So if you want to use social media to call attention to the social character of your company, you better first make sure your company is indeed a social company. The whole company and not only the marketing department.
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