December 23rd, 2008
Social media and traditional business mores
* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation
Guest editorial by Don MacVittie
There is much speculation about how social media is changing business communications, but what are the identifiable differences, and how can they be marshaled in a constricted business environment?
Imagine a store with a string of expletives on a sign out front next to another storefront with risque propositions on its sign, and a third with political slogans for one party or the other. Now imagine the street filled with Christmas shoppers, and consider what happens if the other side of the street has stores advertising their wares in the normal manner.
The first store would be passed up by many people because it was offensive, the second would offend parents for subjecting their children to the signs, and truly half of the people would be less likely to enter the third because the political slogans didn’t match their world-view.
Meanwhile, the other side of the street is drawing in people who want the products advertised.
What, exactly, is different between this scenario and social media? Nothing important, because, as you might notice, the important bits of the above description deal with the reactions of people, not with the stores themselves.
When something like social media comes along and shakes the very foundations of a long-held industry - in this case marketing and PR - we tend to think that everything has changed. Of course it has not, because people do not. The trap of social media is that, hiding behind the perception of anonymity, larger numbers of people are willing to be extreme, so it may even appear that your outrageous blog posts are popular.
But it’s not about mouse clicks or number of links to your site, even though the entire Internet is obsessed with those numbers. It is about how your business is perceived. More importantly, it is about how your business is perceived by likely customers. You can’t know who your likely customers are online - how many offended commenters using the #motrinmoms Twitter tag ever actually bought Motrin or have a baby? There is absolutely no way to know.
An interesting side effect of Internet time is that the Motrin problem may well have flared and burned out in a weekend, when it would have taken word of mouth and months for the same offense to work out without the Internet, and mothers who were offended, left with no other outlet, may well have skipped buying Motrin that won’t now because they felt they had the ability to have their say. Only McNeil, the makers of Motrin, can say for certain, but they are doing what I would have recommended, handling it the same way they always would have, apologizing and moving on.
In general, society doesn’t change rapidly. People’s views on topics that seem as simple to us as racial equality took 100 years to go from slavery to true equality. That’s not a fluke, generation by generation things change, not week by week as some on the Internet wrongly assume. Instant communication has no doubt increased the rate of change, but it is still much slower than Internet time. So before you ditch your media relations department and turn your legions loose on Wordpress and Twitter, consider what those people are going to say and how they’re going to say it. Because your business may count on getting it right.
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
For daily updates on Jennifer's activities, follow her on Twitter.
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