Be quick or be silent: Social media as a business tool As many readers know I live in the Channel Islands. A while back someone started a very popular Facebook group called “Bad or Good Jersey Businesses”, and the locals are not backward in coming forward with both bouquets and brickbats for businesses they've recently dealt with. Unsurprisingly, more and more business people I …
Well said Sir!
It dows however make me rather glad I don't run my own company anymore. To have to be beholden to Twitter, Facebook and the rest is not my idea of fun. If I had to spend time watching for everything that was said about my company on FB etc would stop me actually running the company.
I'm rather glad that I don't touch any of those sites with an 80ft bargepole.
"I'm rather glad that I don't touch any of those sites with an 80ft bargepole"
That statement would mean you have common sense to most people that one would actually want as customers.
80% of your problems are caused by 20% of your customers. If you don't cater to the vacuous idiots on Twatter or Yelp or any number of moronic "popularity contest" websites, you probably don't have as many problem customers as those who do. Those sites in particular provide little more than whining, blackmail and coercion.
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The only use for a Faecebook or Twatter presence appears to be the chance to get a reponse from the company because the exchenge is - at least in the opening stages - very public.
A couple ot times I have tried taking a company to task for something or other, only to have emails ignored. Bring out the dirty wasking in a very public forum and you stand somewhat more chance of a response.
Which all goes to suggest that kind of company is probably not one would wish to have any more dealings with than absolutely necessary.
The in-house Social Media project.
Oh ye Gods. Talk about the Kings New Clothes. The burbles take to it like a dessicated duck to water, waddling about and quacking how fabulous it is and how wonderfully we will all perform and how it will reduce our email traffic.
The reality is that it turns out to be an unending stream of fatuous, sycophantic remarks. The reduction is email traffic is far more than outweighed by the HR dept and other recruits for the B-Ark, pushing every mundane comment out with stock photos of carefully demographically balanced groups of smiling faces, interminable video clips of the management looking Very Important and dimwitted attempts at marketed that tells you the latest widget is very shiny but completely misses actually telling you what it is.
I would dearly love to orchestrate a lift shaft door failure for the fuckwits who think this kind of thing is a good idea, I really would.
Or is it just me being an old, cynical Yorkshireman?????
Oh gawd I had to put one of these in and then spent months 'seeding' it with as much wit and charm as I could muster to try to get the corpse to breathe. A few customer-facing teams used it very effectively, the rest could not give a flying monkey's, and I finally handed it on to someone else.
However, this article is spot-on about social media. There is no place for hesitation cuts. If you are going into social media, first decide how you are going to handle worst-case scenarios, who is going to be the 'voice' of your organisation, and then be quick and smart and helpful. If you can't get it right, don't do it at all.
Look at delta airlines lovely Facebook page, full of praise and compliments. The life expectancy of a criticism is about 4 mins. I know I've tried.
Firms who want to strangle the narrative shouldn't do social media, since it squanders the opportunity for a them to gain insight through the conversation and turns it in to advertising, which people tune out.
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