Thank you very much for sharing your comment. Well, you are definitely right in the frontline together with Isman and Anol here, who believes as deeply that real reputation building starts from within the company. Which is something that is currently very challenging to convince brands to embrace. Most companies are very fearful to ease control. And they want to have every single statement that goes out from within the company to be the exact and accurate message right to the detail of the punctuation marks. It will certainly take a long time for companies to be less up-tight and set policies and guidelines that encourage this movement.

I agree with you that consumers are very smart nowadays. They will know it relatively fast.

Hope to get your comments more frequently, Johannes!

Cheers!
Belinda

now the promised comment

I read your article and agree with you. Especially your comparison with forrest/strategy & trees/plan. Ist easy but everybody understands it. Sometime you need the easy way for explanation.

Of course you have to have your target group/audience in mind when you build up a strategy and afterwords the execution of it. I Like the 3 “W” (what, when, where).

I can see it in my own profiles that not every news/content is interesting to my contacts on twitter, facebook, linkedin and so on… so you have to differ and to ask yourself the 3 “W`s”.

At least as a brand it depends on your content-mix and on your behaviour in the social web. with “behaviour” I mean especially the personal behaviour of the employees who will be responsible as brand ambassadors.

As consumer you will know realatively fast if there is somebody who says what he`s doing! Same for the Company/Brand whatever …

Greetings

Johannes

Absolutely! Here’s where our arguments complement each other. A ‘social media-aware’ organisation (both internally and externally) will most likely be wary of saying too much or too many times. The idea is that such organisation will be much more coordinated and synchronised in their communication, everyone’s on the same page and know what’s gone out and what’s been previously said. And definitely know when to stop. (I love the Old Spice campaign cos they really know how to go out on a high.)

I say the social media manager will be a most welcomed role in such organisation! A gatekeeper of sorts.

Quick suggestion, Belinda, you might want to consider a plugin for your Comments that provide notification for new replies? Good thing I decided to check back

Well, that would be content for a different post called “The top-down social media approach” or “Make social media a company culture” or something. Haha! Well, spot on Isman. That is ideal situation! But the grappling fear that many of these organisations have just fail to take that step (for now). It will take a lot of us to cultivate and change the bigger business environment and culture over time. In my course of work, as much as clients understand the importance and need to make social media a top-down approach and as part of their business strategy, there are many source for concerns especially when big organisations have plenty of bureaucracies to overcome. The least they can do is not to spam their consumers and use social media as a loud hailer. Even if they don’t know how to talk to people yet, at least stop shouting at them.

Without a doubt, you have distilled and outlined the game plan for a ‘social media strategy’ (I personally prefer to refer to it as ‘engagement strategy’. If daily ‘email-casting’ works for close engagement [especially in organisations that have perverse views of social media], then that will be the weapon of choice.) But you’re certainly spot on, the right objectives, relevancy in content and timing will certainly go a long way in cultivating and building the valuable audience.

However, just as Anol mentioned, that big internal gap within organisations in understanding open social communication are a hindrance to effective outwardly social media engagement. Especially in B2B, where the audience can be decidedly muted (again culture is culprit), the assistance of employee brand ambassadors can be a tremendous boost to an objective or campaign.

I have personally experienced this myself. Zero reaction from target audience on distribution. But put that same content into the hands of customer service managers and onto their personal Facebook profiles, the audience went wild! And I am very certain they have clients on their FB profiles. These are the long-term assets (aka communication vehicles) that organisations fail to recognise.

Sorry, what’s the topic again?

Also – the race to be everywhere is a killer. Social media takes time and resources. Stretching yourself thin is not a sustainable tactic for most of the companies. That’s why we find company blogs which are not updated in last 6 months, dry twitter streams and LinkedIn groups without any activities.

Another big missing link I see in organizations – strategy to harness the informal networks. Most likely your people are already in various social networks and connected informally with your clients and prospects. Why not tap on that opportunity and provide them the relevant context, engagement opportunities and (if possible) relevant content to ignite a conversation!

I applaud your final statement – LESS IS MORE!

The second thing is that not every solution is digital. There are many products and services which lend themselves better to offline marketing and PR strategies. As it is, almost every Tom, Dick and Sally agency is jumping into the social media brandwagon – Facebook and Twitter are like virtual fishmarkets (huge ones)! To succeed, brands may want to embrace the strategy that less is more.