Awesome design aesthetic for Facebook’s new offices in Palo Alto

rickwebb:

courtenaybird:

taitran:

Ten Things Social Media Can’t Do

A Healthy Reminder for Setting Expectations

Posted by B.L. Ochman on 11.02.09 @ 10:23 AM

Social media can’t:

1. Substitute for marketing strategy.
   A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.


2. Succeed without top management buy-in.
   Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers.

   The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change.

3. Be viewed as a short-term project.
   Social media is not a one-shot deal. It’s a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit.


4. Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly.
   One of the complaints about social media is that it can’t be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales.

   Those results can’t be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year.

5. Be done in-house by the vast majority of companies.
   A successful social-media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content and contests into online marketing.

   You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience — a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

6. Provide a quick fix to the bottom line or a tarnished reputation.
   Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that’s already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos or Google employs social media, its loyal fans and followers pay attention.

   However, there’s a lot of desperation in a lot of corporate suites these days, and many companies seem been convinced that a social-media campaign can provide a quick fix to sagging sales or reputation issues. Sorry, nuh, uh.

7. Be done without a realistic budget.
   Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing.

   Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce and creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

8. Guarantee sales or influence.
   Unless your effort can pass the “who cares” test — and most simply can’t — your social media efforts will fall flat.

   And unless you know how to drive traffic to your contest, video, blog, event, etc., you’ll have little more than an expensive field of dreams.

9. Be done by “kids” who “understand social innately”
   You can climb Mount Kilaminjaro without a sherpa guide, but why would you? Experience and perspective can make the trip easier, or even save your life.

   Companies trying to run social media without experienced consultants waste time, money and reputation on their efforts. And then, sadly, many decide that this new-fangled approach doesn’t work.

10. Replace PR.
    No matter how great your website, video contest, blog, Twitter strategy, etc., you still need publicity. Or you may end up with a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing it.

http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=140128

I’m going to call bullshit on #5. Many, many companies handle this well in-house, and often the benefits - such as being able to bring real change - often vastly outway the cons. I’m also dubious on #8 - if you can’t guarantee an (eventual) uplift in sales, there’s no point in doing any of this.

I agree, #5 is BS.  The most notable is #2: social media should be utilized by the CEO on down (board members too in a perfect world) for all aspects of the company’s life.  It can’t be something that the CEO and other top management turn on “because that’s what it looks like you’re supposed to do.”  You have to be genuine, otherwise you’ll be spotted a phony a mile away and people will think less of the company’s product(s).  The moment you lose on the question of “are you genuine?” then your credibility is shot….

Mark Zuckerberg has been really good at this at Facebook.  He doesn’t write that many blog posts, but when he does it’s clear that he’s being honest with users and this gives the company a humanistic quality that drives so much of brand affinity and loyalty.  Steve Jobs acts similarly when in the case of large issues, he has sometimes submitted a “letter from Steve” that addresses it (which Apple displays on its home page).

Company Corporate culture is one of the reasons Facebook is such an awesome product and such a successful company (and one that has fundamentally changed the world).  If this sounds familiar, a few other successful places named Google and Apple share similar ethos.  Maybe the rest of “Corporate” America ought to take a page out this playbook and 1) not take themselves so seriously 2) encourage people to have fun at work 3) and dream big!

I was down in Palo Alto the other night for the facebook meetup.  It was a good opportunity to hear about some of the startups that have received funding from fbFund (nutshell mail was especially cool and very useful in light of the policies of most companies regarding facebook, twitter and other social media sites) and hear Clara Shih, author of the Facebook Era.

This will make my publishing that much faster… awesome!