Corporate Social Media – making an honest company of you
Social Media makes an honest organisation of you. If your company screws up, someone somewhere will be saying it and most people will believe that rather than the propaganda driven corporate web pages. People warm to companies who can say “yep we made a mistake, we’re sorry, particularly if you are saying it from within the same social networking communities as your customers.
All social interaction is essentially about being open and honest. After all, these were the principles that my parents and grandparents instilled in me and ever was the case.
But it is difficult for companies to behave like individuals and social media is also a poor moniker for what we have here; it is just new media – Web 2.1 (or some such). From a corporate perspective you are trying to talk with people you don’t know, while you are not there. It hardly passes for polite conversation. It is difficult to offer a firm hand shake and then pass round the Battenberg. What started as way to underpin social relationships has been invaded by a load of corporations saying “I’ll be your friend . Let me send you endless spam all about me and regale you with tales of how great I am “. It’s not going to work is it? The interaction has to be two-way, personal and on the customer’s terms – which means putting the customer first, defending your mistakes and creating a lot of feel-good factor rather than sales leads.
Right now everything is in transition. Corporate websites are a series of walled gardens each protecting its own content. It is difficult to abandon this practice since it is an extension of the way things have always been done. The Social Media landscape assumes an open parkland where the content is used freely by any and all, no matter who created it in the first place. There is a sea-change in culture required. Being closed and protective is the behavior of someone with something to hide and the ebb and flow of social media simply by-passes these sites. Increasingly this will become more so. Initiatives such as Michael Chisari’s Appleseed project which has been picked up by the World Wide Web Consortium under the title of The Future of Social Networking will technically bypass corporate walled gardens making them rather barren places on the web compared to the parkland content everyone else will be working with.
To be seen, heard and able to influence in this new landscape means completely knocking the walls down. It is difficult to simply dabble in social media, you have to make a commitment to it and take a large cultural jump.
Users are currently a lot further ahead of business in this regard. Inevitably businesses will follow the users and equally certainly it will keep them honest.
