Social Media Spin

This is one of the san­est things I’ve read in regard to Social Media PR 2.0 lately.

There has been a lot of social media hype. And in the midst of which, a shift has taken place in the online world that some cor­po­ra­tions are slow to adapt to. Tra­di­tional push mar­ket­ing under the guise of pull mar­ket­ing just doesn’t work with social media. Cor­po­ra­tions need to under­stand the rules of social media mar­ket­ing already.

It’s not a mat­ter of sim­ply throw­ing money at the social media scene, mak­ing a few blogs, writ­ing shite arti­cles — not blog posts, but arti­cles — basi­cally push­ing their mes­sage on the social media scene and expect­ing it to mon­e­tize for them. It doesn’t work that way. Not anymore.

Enter­prise needs to finally fig­ure out that they don’t have con­trol of their brand online. If they want to regain con­trol of their brand, it’s not about the quick fix. They have to refo­cus and lis­ten. It’s about tak­ing time to find out who the influ­encers in their indus­try are, join­ing in with them, and becom­ing a viable part of a com­mu­nity. Then, and only then, by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the com­mu­nity will they have an oppor­tu­nity to become an influ­encer them­selves, to lever­age the real rela­tion­ships they’ve worked to develop, and truly meet the core needs/​wants of their cus­tomers. Only then will they be able to man­age any bad rep­u­ta­tion buzz in social media net­works by being a trusted com­mu­nity mem­ber that deals head on with neg­a­tive cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. Only then can they make a real dif­fer­ence in their customer’s expe­ri­ence with their com­pany. And only then will they start to under­stand the power-​​sharing of their brand through social media.