Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 – Lessons for Social Media Teams

 

Last evening I was fortunate to attend the Chicago Social Club event hosted by Edelman’s Richard Edelman and David Armano. The topic was the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer and themes that it implies for business, governments, and NGOs.

One of the more interesting observations from this year’s study is the shift away from trusting government leaders and business leaders towards the average employee in an organization. I take that as a pretty strong signal that we’re starting to come out of the Great Recession of 2008-11. With the disaster of the past years playing such a large role in the average person’s life, it seems appropriate that looking to government leaders to lead us out of the mess would be strong. Trust that our elected leaders would help us find a path forward seemed like a good strategy at the time. However, looking back now, we see that in many ways our leadership in government failed us completely no matter which side of the aisle you support. That break down in trust pushed us back to what I would call our gut feelings. That is, I trust someone more like me than someone who is not like me. The statistics backing this up provided by Richard Edelman were interesting to say the least.  While Americans tend to be very parochial in viewing the world through an America first lens, the rest of the world experienced similar drops in trust for its leadership. For example, Brazil respondents reported a huge 50% drop in trust for their leaders despite their economy doing really well in comparison to the U.S. Europeans responded with a staggering 66% drop in trust of their leaders.

As Richard continued, a simple reason for this came through… there is a huge gap right now between actual performance by our government leaders and their words. The old adage “Words are cheap.” applies here.

So, you are probably thinking what does this have to do with Social Media and Online Communities. Well, in truth it has a lot to do with both.

 Let’s look at what was discussed in terms of corporate trust. CEOs are the second least trusted group following government leaders. In their place in the trust hierarchy, the trust in the “average employee” has risen significantly. To me, a compelling reason for this rise is due to the employees using social media to communicate with each other, customers, prospects, with their network effect spreading the information faster and better than traditional communications. Bloggers play an important role as an information resource, but so do content curators who help audiences skim through massive amounts of information quickly. When Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are used to then spread the information through a network, the message is amplified. With the right source, tone, and level of information, trust is built. We see this all the time in online communities. Those members who reply to others frequently, with good information are trusted more by members than those who don’t answer or engage. That applies to both company personnel and non-company members.

Along these same lines, what struck me as interesting was that of all the industries measured by Edelman technology was trusted the most by respondents. While this has been the case for many years, with the shift towards trusting average employees over CEOs, it makes sense. Companies like Cisco, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple have had open communication channels with their customers, prospects, partners, developers, and other stakeholders for years. We know that these communities are populated with employees who care about their community members and their information needs. When managed properly, communities build a lot of trust. The movement towards external communities using social media (LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, etc.) will continue to generate trust for the companies that execute them properly. But it begins with a dedicated group of employees who truly want to engage.

During one of the questions asked, Richard Edelman said “The rise in trust of the average employee to #4 in the survey is controversial to clients. Those who want top down communication not horizontal or peer-to-peer communications find this trend really hard to take. But in the end, you have to allow for the dispersion of ideas.” Unfortunately those companies see the risk as too great versus the potential reward.

In our experience over the past twelve years, we’ve seen those companies that keep their eye on the reward make gains that bring value to their organization using communities and social media. Those that focus on the risk not only don’t bring the value they could, but also make the social media mistakes that you read about in the media. So, which do you want to be?

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#EPICFAIL – Lessons in PR disasters

When playing ostrich with your social media just makes things worse.

My husband is a runner (I sometimes run…right before having an asthma attack). He’s big into 5K races and is working his way up to 10K races and half marathons. Last year he very eagerly registered for a popular run taking place in the Washington, DC area. He thought it would be a great event being that we could all fly in, see his family, and maybe even cheer him on as he crossed the finish line. Fun for everyone, right?!

As the race got closer, things got weirder. You couldn’t park close to the race event unless you were riding with other racers. If you wanted to go to the race as a spectator, you had to go to a public transit station far away from the race location and then take a shuttle. The course was planned along a narrow route, part of which was on a highway. It went on and on and on. But, this post isn’t about the race and the ensuing race day debacle. It’s the social media debacle after the race debacle that’s the real story.

Turns out the race was so poorly organized that a Facebook page was started DURING the race about how bad it was. Over 1,000 people have liked this page to date. It’s a small percentage of the 22,000 that showed up to race but anytime a Facebook page about something like a 5K race gets that much traction, you know it’s bad. Here’s where the fun begins. Angry racers began posting comment after comment on this page about how bad the race was. From alleged dangerous conditions to sub-par goodie bags, it was clear racers were incensed. They didn’t keep their rage contained to the fail page either. They also made sure that the organizers knew how they felt on the event’s Facebook page. They left hundreds of comments blasting the race. Some were even demanding a refund of their registration fee. And what was the response from the organizers? Nothing. Not one comment was responded to within the comments section. Going further, users began accusing the organizers of deleting comments and one user (who started the fail page) was supposedly blocked from the event Facebook page. The day after the event an official apology was posted and promptly met with angry comments from disappointed runners and silence from the organizers (although they did manage to update their rules about what kind of posts would be deleted). Three days after that a second apology was posted with the exact same response.

If you look at the race’s Facebook page now, there still has never been any acknowledgement of the problems that runners mentioned in their comments. Instead, organizers state in their About page that any complaints could be sent to their customer support email address or they could call the customer support hotline. Note that I said it’s on their “About” page. None of that was mentioned on their main Facebook page. This, friends, is what is called “playing ostrich.” If you pretend it isn’t there, it never really happened. Rather than taking the opportunity to use their Facebook page as a way to sincerely connect with the consumers who paid a good chunk of change to be in the “race” they ignored their criticisms. Their lack of response was so bad that even the event sponsor threw them under the bus by releasing a statement voicing their disappointment.

So what can be learned here? Personally, I think the lesson to be learned is that ignoring what your audience is saying is tantamount to brushing them off and no one likes being brushed off. More and more, people are foregoing the informational vacuums of hotlines and customer support email accounts and going straight to the source: your Facebook page. This is a change that cannot be ignored. Companies can’t pretend it’s not there. People are going to say bad things about your company and it’s easier than ever to do so very publicly. The other thing they can’t ignore is the idea that those negative comments will be contained to the comments section of the wall posting. With the recent changes in Facebook’s layout, users can readily see not only what their friends are saying but what the friends of their friends are saying by way of the scrolling feed on the right hand side of everyone’s profile. It’s like a Clairol commercial gone bad.

The answer to this situation is so simple. Respond. You can’t respond to everyone in a media crisis but you can do more than post and run. Take the time to reach out in a place where others can see you doing it. They need to see the olive branch being handed out. Even if you can’t offer compensation, the least you can do is spend some time responding to those comments. If you look at companies that have the highest customer satisfaction rates and loyalty, you will also see that they are masters at responding. There’s no posting and running. If they see a critical comment, they take notice and they make sure that everyone else who saw that comment sees their response.

By playing ostrich this company was met with a giant PR nightmare. Angry comments, a Facebook page dedicated to them dropping the ball, a petition with people vowing to boycott any future races, complaints to the BBB, and a slew of nasty articles in local papers. Ouch. Let this be an example to all those who think their social media pages are just there for information. They aren’t. They are a voice for your consumers and your consumers will let you know when they’re madder than a snake that’s just been stepped on. They WILL turn on you. The question is will you be able to stop them?

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Space Science and Social Media

Recently, the celebrated American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson teamed up with Reddit for a very special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. For several hours Neil answered hundreds of questions about his thoughts on space, space science, and the future of scientific research and education in America. Neil is already known for his charismatic demeanor and it came through even in his text based responses.

So what does this have to do with social media? Neil’s AMA is an excellent example of using social media to not only engage but inspire a captive audience. While you have to be willing to deal with the unexpected, the opportunity for thought leadership is unprecedented. Putting yourself out there and advertising the idea that people are encouraged to come “pick your brain” for a few hours is a great way to make your mark on the social landscape as someone who not only is willing to offer your own thoughts and ideas but also entertain the thoughts and ideas of others. Take a few moments and read through the conversation at Reddit. Beware, though! Neil’s appearance garnered a whopping 11,000 comments!

About Neil deGrasse Tyson: Widely touted as the next Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a tireless and fearless advocate of space science. Currently the head of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and future host of the sequel to Carl Sagan’s epic Cosmos series, Neil has dedicated his life to once again making science an exciting and attainable field for the next generation. If you have time to get misty eyed, check out Neil’s account of meeting Carl Sagan for the first time.

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Pro-Active Social Media: Taking Audience Engagement to the Next Level

While doing some research on how companies are incorporating social media into their communications, I came across two intriguing articles that really got me thinking about how far the social media industry could go and whether it should go there. The first article, When Customer Service is a Twitter Response, was actually written in response to the Hotels Magazine article, A Day in the Life of the Digitized Hotel(registration required to read). The Hotels Magazine article was a proposed day of interaction between a hotel and their guest completely driven by social media. First, the guest gets off the plane and complains on Twitter that the taxi line is long to which to hotel quickly responds asking if they would like the hotel to contact a car service for them. In a second exchange, the guest is sent a message on their hotel provided iPad recommending a massage because the guest had mentioned in a tweet that they were considering having one after a long day. Finally, when the guest returns home and mentions the hotel in their tweet the hotel again responds this time thanking the guest and giving them a code for a complimentary upgrade on their next stay.

The idea of taking social media to this level was fascinating even though the “big brother” aspect was admittedly a little creepy. The comments I read in the Economist article were mostly against this kind of heavy social media driven interaction. Many of the comments lamented the loss of human interaction in our society while others were somewhat unsettled by the thought of companies knowing that much about where they were and what they were doing. One commenter actually recounted how he stayed at a hotel only to find out that the hotel (and many others) had actually removed the in-room phones because they assumed that all their guests had cell phones and it was just costing them money to keep them in the rooms.

Taking it to the extreme that the fictional hotel did does smack of something from Minority Report but I’m still left asking myself why shouldn’t companies engage their audience (or event heir business partners) in this way just on a smaller scale? I don’t know that I lament the use of social media by companies to pro-actively engage their customers. If my options for communication are calling a company and being put on hold for an undetermined amount of time or making a request online which can instantly be dealt with, I know which one I’m picking.

I recently helped put together a presentation on examples of companies successfully implementing social media into their business plan. One of the stand outs was TATA Docomo, a telecom provider in India. Rather than operating like most corporations who expect the masses to come to them, TATA Docomo realized that the only way they were going to make inroads in the tough Indian telecom market was to go to the people. They now skillfully leverage both Twitter and Facebook as their main means of communicating with their customers for both customer service issues as well as informing them of new offerings. This has lead to huge customer loyalty despite the lack of a “physical” connection.

The generations that are coming of age now are doing it in a time of amazing digital advancements. I’m old enough to remember the days before the internet was a daily part of life but young enough to be in the generation of adults who are keen to absorb any new digital gadget that comes onto the market. Businesses need to realize this fact and capitalize on it. Don’t be afraid of using social media for these kinds of communications. Companies that start a Facebook page only to tell all the people who ask for help that they need to contact the customer service number are going to be sorely disappointed by their “community” building efforts. That’s because they aren’t engaging people in the places where they actually want to be engaged. The example of TATA Docomo is one that companies should look to as the way forward. TATA has engaged their communities consistently on the formats they know are the most popular. What did it get them? It took them from the bottom of the Indian telecom barrel to the top of the mountain. They were the 9th telecom company to enter the Indian market and faced competitors who had been there for years but in a very short time they were the top. Why? It worked because they embraced what social media could do for them.

Ignoring the changing communication landscape is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. The world is changing around us, why not change with it? Our two part blog series on this very topic titled Executive Use of Social Media discusses the importance of this changing landscape and highlights the success several major companies have had in implementing social media into their business operations. Part One is already posted so be sure to check back and watch Part Two.

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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 1)

 

There’s been a shift in social media. Have you seen it? Business to business companies in industries beyond the traditional early adopters are utilizing social media more effectively today to build awareness, generate business, and nurture customers than as little as six months ago. Research that has been published over the past year shows that B2B social media is not only becoming more prevalent, but is also expected by customers, prospects, investors, and recruits.

In the video below, we’re going to interprete the relevant research from multiple sources in order to present a pretty compelling analysis for using social media in the business to business setting. In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll show you how several companies such as Cisco, Intuit, ShipServe, and Impact Interactions have used social media in the B2B setting to achieve real business results. We’ll also provide you with a measurement methodology which will help your team to quickly identify areas where action is necessary as well as where you are successful.

So in the words of the immortal Warner Wolf, let’s go to the video tape!

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Consumer Focused Social Media: Are We Building a Brand or Simply Throwing Money Away?

If your social media strategy is all about coupons and discounts for your company, you’re not really getting the point of social media from a business perspective. Sounds a bit arrogant right? Well, let me explain what we’ve seen over the past several weeks as we analyzed a segment of the retail space…

Company A (Large U.S. Based firm in the Womens’ Apparel category) – Analyzed 400 tweets, 293 were related to promotions for a 10% coupon. Analyzed 125 wall posts, 96 were related to the same promotion.

Company B (Large U.S. Based firm in the Sportwear category) – Analyzed 200 tweets, 127 were related to a BOGO (buy one get one) offer. Analyzed 63 wall posts, 48 were related to the same offer.

Company C (Large Internations firm in the Apparel category) – Analyzed 320 tweets, 148 were about a buy X amount of merchandise online and get a coupon for 20% off your next purchase. Tweets autoposted to Facebook. (YIKES!)

Is this what social media has become for the B2C market, a platform to push coupons?

What our analysis, limited as it may be, is showing us is that the Retail market is simply building an audience which activates only for a deal. Yes consumers want a deal, but do you as a seller only want your customers to come to your site when you offer a coupon? Doesn’t really seem like brand building does it? While many companies get it right (see Nike for one and Zappos for another), many do not. It’s as if these companies are competing with the Groupons, Living Socials, CouponDeals, etc. of the world rather than focusing upon their customers’ needs and building their brand in the process.

Maybe B2C social media marketers could learn from how B2B companies are using social media to build relationships.

“But Mike, that won’t work. You have to capture the shopper’s attention.”

I’d agree with you on that, it’s how you do it with social media where I differ… Let’s go about this use of social media in a different, more consumer-brand friendly way. Start with your brand. Is this something that you continually want to cheapen by constantly incentivising followers/friends to only care about when they get a discount? More importantly from a business perspective, how does constant couponing impact your margins?

Really successful social media programs understand that there are steps to reach success. First there is audience building, then engagement and activation, which in turn leads to value for the company. Too often companies lead with activation, skipping the audience building and engagement processes that generate loyalty. Audience building is time consuming, but works to give your company an group of followers and fans who actually are interested in your brand and products. (To learn more about why followers and fan counts are not a measure of influence, read this.) Audience building takes compelling content that excites and interests your potential customer. Social Media activities which compliment your existing brand building activities help to build audience. Use your branding messages from Television, in-store promotions, print, etc. to expand your reach to social media viewers.

Engage with your fans and followers. Pay attention to their content. Are they retweeting or tweeting a positive mention for your brand? If so, send them a direct message and thank them. Does a customer want help with store locations? Sure they could go to your site and use your store locator, but why not engage and ask them what city they are near and then give them a list of locations? What about that person who complains about a poor experience? Engage with them by apologizing and offering to have customer service contact them. Post content about your product line, post content about what your company is doing in the communities it operates in, post content about industry news from news sources you trust, and post pictures of people using or wearing your products.

Remember visual ques are just as important as customer reviews. That’s why so many brands pay celebrities to use their products in public. Social Media just allows a larger group to do the same thing. User generated content is a powerful tool to utilize in social media, yet we see very few brands even try to do this without offering a prize or coupon.

And that goes back to the point of this post, by providing incentives as your main content on social media, you are doing a disservice to your brand. From our blog post on incentives, “Remember that it’s EGO that drives the participation of your top members. They crave recognition for their efforts, not trinkets.”

That message holds true today for your best customers… so engage with them, give them an opportunity to shine, then recognize them. Otherwise, you’ve doomed your social media audience to be a zombie group which only activates for a coupon, not because your brand is of interest.

Zombie Image from: http://neighbourhoodzombiewatch.wordpress.com/

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Why Social Media Shouldn’t Be Treated Like a Shiny New Toy

We’ve all seen it happen. A kid begs their parents for the latest and greatest toy because ALL of their friends have it. The toy gets bought, played with in earnest for a week or two, and then is promptly set aside only to collect dust and create clutter. Then one day the child’s parent walks into the room to find something and is totally overwhelmed by the mountain of junk they have to sift through to find what they need. The same can happen to your company’s social media campaign if you aren’t careful.

Too often, companies launch Facebook and Twitter sites before fully understanding why they want them. They don’t know what it does or how to use it but they know their competitors have it and they assume they need it to give them an edge. So, they get their Facebook page going, send out a few Tweets, and make ready for the waves of new fans and maybe even some customers. Except, the fans and customers don’t come. Why? Because the company didn’t think about what they were going to do with their new toy once they got it and now it’s just another waste of money.

Social media has power; a lot of it. But you have to wield that power in the right way. We at Impact Interactions strongly believe in what we call the “Beacon Strategy.” You want to utilize certain tools in ways that will guide new users to your main repository of information (your website), not leave them lost in the sea of digital clutter. Facebook and Twitter can’t replace a robust website full of quality information, nor should it. These are simply tools, lures even, that should be used judiciously. When considering how to use these tools you must first know where you’re going, what you want to achieve, and how you can measure your success. Once you have determined those things then you can go out and make the investment in developing a social media campaign. Always understand the why of your campaign before you think about the how and then make a commitment to nurture the campaign over time rather than letting it sit and get dusty next to the last latest greatest business toy you just had to have.

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Building Internal Wins – Avoiding the Social Media Dilemma

In an earlier post, I wrote about the most frequent comments and questions that I hear from online community and social media managers when I attend events. Even though social media is a very hot topic today, many managers believe they could do better work for their companies if they had stronger internal participation, additional budget, and a stronger tie to important business objectives.

In our experience, this requires proving the value of your efforts through small wins that captivate your audience. You want your internal executive audience to say “Wow!” not “That’s nice to know, thanks.” Which gets you their attention and their support?

To get the WOW factor into your presentations, you must move beyond the “what went up and what went down” type of analysis and instead focus on the key executive level achievements for your efforts. That requires understanding business goals for the social or community project. Once you identify what you want to accomplish from a business perspective, you can build the measurement strategy to report on the achievement of the goal.

In previous blog posts, we’ve covered our measurement methodology of Traffic, Behavior, and Value. Using these categories of metrics, we develop interactive dashboards which bring the methodology to life for our clients. The idea is to make the numbers more than a spreadsheet or powerpoint chart. The first way to do that is to flip the way you present data from the building to the value style to the leading with value presentation style. If you cannot capture the executive’s attention in about 30 seconds, you’ve missed your opportunity in our opinion. That’s what makes the dashboard concept so strong. It catches the attention of your audience and encourages them to click around and learn more.

To see this in action, click on our sample dashboard: Social Media Dashboard v.2.0 (FLASH required)

Now go ahead and play. Click through the tabs, check and uncheck boxes, go to the WHAT IF link and see how changing your offering mix impacts your objectives… all of this is based upon feedback from executives as to what they want to see. We suspect that most would stay on the first executive summary slide and maybe click on the value slide.

By demonstrating a quantitative approach to social media and commmunities which helps achieve business objectives, you break through the dilemma by proving the value of your efforts. You can annotate the results with qualitative data points, user generated content which backs up your results, and plans for future projects. In the end, to achieve internal success you have to prove the value and interactive dashboards are one of the best ways to do this… just ask our clients Cisco and NetApp. We’ve built very successful dashboards that help them demonstrate the success of their efforts in social media, blogging, and online communities.

If you want to learn more about social media measurement, dashboards, or proving the value of social media and communities, please contact us or leave a comment below.

 

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The Social Media Dilemma

Last week several members of the our team attended the iStrategy Conference in San Francisco. Along with our clients Cisco, SAP, and NetApp, I hosted a panel discussion on B2B Social Media: Moving Beyond the Hype. (You can get the download of the presentation slides here.)

As is often the case with conferences, the best part is usually the networking that we do at lunch, cocktail hours, and late night at the hotel bar. What I found fascinating about this particular conference and its attendees was the dilemma that many are in relating to social media. Whether business to consumer or business to business, the same issues continued to come up in conversation. That is “how can we manage so many sites and messages and still deliver results?”

Of course, we’re an outsourced provider of social media and online community services so it would have been easy to say “Hire us!” But I really wanted to uncover the underlying reasons for the issue and why it was causing so much angst amongst the attendees. In short, there were four main reasons:

1. Budgets for social media remain very limited at larger organizations who are just getting started. That translates to minimal staff to get the program up and running.
2. Staffing models are not clear. Too often there is a single person or a team of 3 to 6 members running the entire social media program with responsibilities split between full time and part time activities.
3. There remains far too much focus on which tool to use versus the appropriate content for the audience. Choosing a tool is easier than gaining commitment for content generation and teams are falling into the “if you build it, they will come” type of thinking because there isn’t a clear social content strategy for their firm.
4. When it comes to measurement, social media practioners remain focused on traffic at the expense of value. I heard a lot of questions about “growing” followers and fans but hardly any about gaining business value from using social media tools. (In fact, when our client NetApp discussed how they found value (hundreds of millions of dollars of sales), not a single person tweeted about it. When our client Cisco discussed how they believe 90% of internet traffic will be video in the coming years, everyone tweeted about it. Think about it, which is actually more important to resolving your social media dilemma?)

So where does this all lead? Well, it reminds me of the early online community period back in 2000 or so. Companies wanted to interact with their customers and inherently understood that this was a good thing to do. But they didn’t know for sure how to go about it. In many cases, companies made community management 10% of ten people’s responsibilities to get to the 100% effort and focus. Back then that didn’t work, and from the comments of the folks I spoke with last week it’s not working now either.

What we’ve learned is that social media takes a team with multiple roles to achieve success. From an executive champion who can get budget and support for the project to facilitators who know how to properly interact with the social audience, there needs to be a team to achieve success. To only have a social media manager who is responsible for using all the tools, training/monitoring internal users, scambling for useful content, measuring success, and recording best practices is never going to work in most cases. Not everyone is a strategic thinker, nor is everyone able to tie back their activities to business objectives (or even define them), nor is everyone able to interact with online audiences appropriately.

Yet too often, that is what we are asking our social media managers to take on 24/7. It is a dilemma.  In our experience, the best way for social media teams or managers to solve this dilemma is by achieving and sharing relevant customer social wins with their stakeholders. These social wins can be qualtitative (commentary that shows intent or influence) or the full quantitative (number of new registrations added to the marketing database for example). Wins gain momentum internally, uncertain results help projects remain as second class cool things which don’t really add to the business. Which can you deliver to help you solve the dilemma and get what you need to be successful?

I’d love to hear how you are solving the dilemma at your firm. If you have questions, post them and we’ll help…

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Social Media: Whose Brand Is It? A Contrarian View

This week’s Fortune Magazine has a very interesting article in its career section titled “Building Your Brand (and keeping your job)” by Jost Hyatt. Are you a senior level marketer in an company that is moving quickly into social media? If so, this article should be on your critical reading list. Here’s why (excerpted from the article):

“When Monty joined Ford, he brought with him 3,500 Twitter followers; he now counts 41,000, conceding that many of those came with the big blue oval logo that now accompanies his tweets.”

“And he’s kept his Twitter handle as @scottmonty rather than adding the Ford brand. ‘I was Scott Monty before I came to Ford, and I’ll be Scott Monty after I leave Ford,’ he says.”

And he is absolutely correct… when he leaves Ford, he takes all the brand equity from his social media efforts with him. Well, maybe not all but certainly a lot.  This is not a criticism of Scott in any way, just a social media tactic that is going to back fire with a lot of companies as the economy gets better and people start changing companies again.

As we wrote in an earlier blog post, Walking Out the Door with the Twitter Password, organizations must have a plan for social media and turnover of employees. But we didn’t go in to the brand equity and ownership issue. So with the above article as an example, here are our thoughts.

Contrary to popular opinion that brands are owned by everyone in the world of social media and that organizations should give up control, we argue that this advice results in companies giving away valuable assets. The number one objective for using social media from a brand perspective should be to build the importance of the brand in the audience’s thoughts. That’s why marketers use advertising to build awareness, coupons to build trial use, and consistency in branding to build a relationship with consumers. In B2B terms, it’s still about awareness but the relationship factor becomes even more important. With all of the money spent by marketers to build their brands, enhance them, and promote them, why would they let the value slip away as someone walks out the door for a new position? But with the social media tactics promoted and utilized by so many, this is exactly what companies are doing.

“People forget that they are always representing their companies… If you send a tweet that says ‘My Boss sucks,’ you have to be aware of what could happen.” – Lucia Erwin, fomrerly H-P’s sr. director of strategic workforce planning

And here’s an example of how personal accounts acting as corporate accounts can back fire from the article:

“Amy D. was a social-networking expert at a marketing firm. She was just ‘letting out some frustration’ last year when she issued a tweet noting the irony that she was editing a presentation about social media for her boss who didn’t use it. She got fired shortly thereafter for violating a new communications policy.”

(Amy probably wasn’t a real social networking expert because that was such a rookie mistake. But that is another story about our industry all together…)

So what is a company to do? Well, for one rethink this tactic. Think about the number of cases where an employee has tweeted, added to their wall, or commented on a blog inappropriately or worse in a way critical of the brand. It’s easy to write these off as isolated instances, but it happens a lot. That’s why companies institute social media policies for their organizaiton’s employees to follow. It gives them recourse and a limited amount of protection should they fire someone (as also mentioned in the article above).

A better tactic is to use the brand as the leader, not an individual. The account(s) are owned by the company, not the individual. The passwords are the property of the company. If the individual leaves, the account remains in tact but with a new author. Does the author get some credit? Sure, in the profile section of the company brand’s account. For example, the account for your product could be titled “AcmeWidgets” with a profile that states “AcmeWidgets provides product information and company communications. Our account is written and managed by JoAnn Smith, an Acme employee with six years of experience in the Widget Industry.” (See our Twitter account profile as an example: @ImpactInteract.)

That way, the focus of your company’s social media efforts remains on the brand not on the personality of the employee. It also gives credit to your employee, but allows your company to switch out the author at any time without losing your audience. 

While some ‘gurus’ and social media ‘experts’ will argue about transparency or being authentic here, this tactic is transparent/authentic, it gives your company a social media voice, and it allows for a measure of protection of your most valuable asset…. your brand.

Sometimes, it pays to follow a contrarian idea and go against the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ especially if it involves maintaining your brand’s position and standing in an ever growing social world.

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