For every social m
edia success, there are multiple disasters that receive 10 times the publicity. It pays, therefore, to remember that while social media offers fantastic opportunities for business, networking and professional development, it is also a fragile and powerful tool that needs special care and consideration.
Personal/professional integration
Most practitioners encourage social media newbies to be themselves. There is no doubt that your audience/customers identify better with a face than a brand, but there is great danger in going too far.
If you’re representing your company, brand or product, always keep that in mind when communicating under their banner. Leave your hang-ups and politics at home, and focus on your company’s goal. Even when you’re communicating under your personal brand, be careful with how tightly you integrate. It may be handy to connect your Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook accounts — but if you’re known to make faces at the camera or have ever donned a lampshade as a hat, you might want to rethink who has access to your profile. (read more…)
The 5 most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media this past week:
- A tweet too far
- Twitter scoops MSM on dramatic water landing
- 5 tech essentials for Team Obama
- How the Body Shop USA could improve its tweeting
- Twitter tips for newbies
Image credit, iStock (read more…)
Blogging and social media presences that sound like your corporate press release won’t work. Social media is where people talk to people, not to lifeless or unoriginal companies. At the same time, it doesn’t require a personality boot camp to get started — you already know how to talk like a real person.
What to do:
- Get out of the PR department. Try letting folks that haven’t been trained in press releases and marketing speak find your authentic voice.
- Respond instead of write. A lot of the pressure of social media comes from the idea that you have to create the new, hot stuff. Instead, find your voice through sharing your thoughts on others’ ideas.
- Talk about old stuff. Your content doesn’t have to be news to be authentic — it just has to be interesting.
I watched the inauguration on TV and online. While scrolling through both reverent and snarky comments in the form of frequent Facebook status updates, I couldn’t help thinking about the old cable comedy show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. In case you don’t remember, it debuted in 1988, when the civilian Internet 
was comprised chiefly of dial-up users chatting via CompuServe and Prodigy. The show featured an man and his robot friends delivering a running commentary on bad 1950s sci-fi movies.
At the time I thought the show’s central conceit was a little presumptuous. Why sit in silence listening to the patter of professional comics? Why not mock B-movies with one’s own friends?
Now I realize, the show’s obvious deficit just pointed the way to the future. The joint CNN-Facebook inauguration streaming transformed coverage from a passive viewing event to an interactive salon — but one in which no single voice is drowned out by the din of cross-talk, and one in which the opinions of one’s own contacts are given equal weight to those of insider pundits. (read more…)
There are a lot of great tools out there to monitor the conversation about you, and there are several vendors who specialize in monitoring that can be great partners and integral components to your social media efforts. But if you’re just getting started or are curious about monitoring the conversation going on about you, you can get going without any money.
What to do:
- Use free monitoring. Google’s blog search () is a powerful tool to track blog conversations and allows you to set up alerts to notify you anytime you’re mentioned.
- Use your team. Assign different staff members to monitor key forums, blogs or Web sites that discuss you or your industry.
- Reexamine existing data. Odds are, the answers to your order form’s “How did you hear about us?” can point you to a lot of the sources of conversation about your brand.
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