Daily Bytes: A Social Media Quartet to Start the Week
Posted on Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Happy Monday! A start to a new week and a time to look at the many perspectives of social media: why it is not working at some companies and the questions you need to ask to make it work, the realities of social media, the need to integrate social media into your presentations and four strategies for social media success.
5 Things You Must Ask About Social Media
This post by Jay Deragon in The Relationship Economy blog is built off of Amy Mengel’s recent post on the five reasons why companies are failing at social media. The reasons include: 1) they can’t talk about anything other than their products, 2) they listen to customers but don’t take action, 3) they aren’t calibrated internally with the technology, 4) they are not framing risk accurately, and 5) their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success. Jay agrees with Amy’s assessment and points out that “Marketing and messaging is no longer isolated, rather it is now a reflection of the organizational quality and effectiveness of management.” Organizational quality and effectiveness of management requires asking the right questions. The diagram below illustrates what Jay suggests as the needed framework for asking the right questions.
Organizational Effectiveness Facilitates a New System of Communicating
3 Realities of Social Media
Michael Brito writes a guest post for PR 2.0 where he focuses on his observations of social media at this juncture: 1) consumers already get it, brands are trying to figure it out; 2) brands should focus on people first, tools last, and 3) thee is no such thing as a social media expert quite yet. I totally agree that the focus should be on people first and tools last. Before you focus on tools, you need to know where your audience is and how to engage with them. And I love the comment on there is not such thing as a social medi expert “quite yet”! We are still in early days and figuring everything out.
Do speakers need to weave social media into their presentations?
This post from James Gurd in the Econsultancy blog was inspired by blog post from Jeremiah Owyang last week about integrating social media into their presentations. In contrast to Jeremiah’s “two-fisted speaking” strategy (clicker in one hand and mobile device in the other), James recommends enlisting a social media executive to help monitor the social media back-channel. He also provides some other useful pointers to manage the tweet-speak during presentations.
Four Steps to Social Media Marketing Success
This is a great post in Search Engine Watch from Erik Qualman, whose recent presentation – Social Media is Not a Fad - became a viral sensation. In the post, Erik asserts that there are four simple, yet “critical” steps to executing an effective social media strategy as illustrated below:
Four Critical Social Media Strategy Steps
Erik points out the steps are laid out in stair fashion to illustrate that companies need to start with listening and build up to the selling step.