Category — Social Media
Who’s in Your Community: Friend, Follower, or Figment?
Social media offers us an opportunity to build our own virtual community. One would think that if you are creating the community, you would have control over the participants. You do, if you make it private. If not, your online community is like a real neighborhood filled with friends, dissidents, curmudgeons, and trolls. There are also figments – users who aren’t really present and sometimes aren’t real.
The difference between real and virtual neighborhoods is management. Active users of social media have to manage their community. They have to choose who to follow or friend, when to block, and how to respond to trolls. It can easily consume hours every day.
If you want a good community, the management cannot be automated. There are tools that speed the process, but your eyes are needed to differentiate between the good, bad, and nonexistent. They all look the same to a bot. You have to clean it up yourself.
Last week Sharon Mostyn (@sharonmostyn) asked about managetwitter.com. Since I’m continuously testing new tools, I decided to check it out. The functionality for managing following/followers is similar to Buzzom.com, but one different feature was particularly appealing to me. It allowed me to see inactive people that I was following. [Read more →]
Who Gets to Decide When a Story is Done?
The Kevin Smith Southwest Air story continues to be discussed online and off despite Kevin’s request two days ago for everyone to talk about something else.
Wouldn’t it be nice if social media worked that way? Apparently, that is how Kevin thinks it works. He fired off a series of shots at Southwest Air gaining exposure for his experience across a multitude of channels. When he tired of the drama, he fired one last time on his blog and finished with “But, folks? Tomorrow? Let’s Tweet about other stuff, shall we? This is starting to taste mediciney and fruitless.”
Kevin’s community may follow his direction, but social media isn’t a movie where you get to yell, “CUT!” and everything stops until you are ready to start again. Social media is [Read more →]
Do You Argue for Social Media’s Limitations?
The debate about return on investment for social media rages on despite the reality that there is very little financial wiggle room in today’s economic climate. I recently overheard someone complaining about management’s reluctance to test social media because the proposal didn’t include a method for measurement. He said that they didn’t require a return on investment for cleaning services, business cards, or lawn care, so why did they need one for social media?
Do we want to social media to be a cost of doing business or a tool for generating revenue?
If you argue for your limitations, you will own them. If social media is to be a viable marketing solution, it has to be measurable and sustainable. Limiting it to the expense column is shortsighted. A better plan is to find ways to measure the effect of social media on the bottom line.
What do you think?
