Comments on: When Does Social Media Become Too Risky for Corporate Use?

By: Haroon

Haroon — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:20:46 +0000

Hey Mark… you might want to remove the “pattern” shading you’ve done with the every alternative reply on this page. It’s kinda hard to read.

By: Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:16:26 +0000

You also have to look at a cost/benefit analysis and the popular acceptance of a tool. As for cost/benefit, Twitter is free for now, so the cost is the time of employees to utilize it, create interaction and monitor the results. When you combine a free tool with the ease of use for the people you’re trying to reach, as well as and the large number of users, I think it far outweighs the various service outages. Finally, when Twitter goes down, the community blames Twitter – not Southwest or Dell. Twitter has an insanely loyal following that seems to take regular service outages in stride. The users know these are growing pains, and a company being a part of those growing pains will increase that company’s cache as the service becomes more stable and accepted.

By: leo rayman

leo rayman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:26:29 +0000

Strikes me, as a PR outsider, that the whole edifice is built upon unreliable third parties no?

By: Rich Reader

Rich Reader — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:03:13 +0000

We’re all falling short of where we should be in our target segment business intelligence and action because we lack the lock, portability, mining, and analysis capability. Who is taking the lead in this direction?

Perhaps we can find a genuine subject matter expert and practitioner in this quest to tap into, engage with, and activate the groundswell.

http://richreader.blogspot.com/

By: Mike Manuel

Mike Manuel — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:23:39 +0000

@Rich, data lock or I guess, data portability, is something we probably need to talk more about. It’s a legitimate concern the longer we rely on third parties for comms, marketing, etc.

@John, I agree, although choosing a service provider that, well, sucks will begin to reflect badly on the company at some point, right? I mean, is it that different to think our standards and expectations for, say, a corporate website and the uptime we just expect of it, should be that different when you bring corporate social media into the mix?

By: John Stauffer

John Stauffer — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:23:19 +0000

It’s great series of questions and important ones to ask when assesing the potential use on behalf of a client.

Ultimately, I think the answer hinges on the needs of the client. If an organization is on twitter primarily to be a resource for consumers (e.g. southwest) then I think it’s OK that, every now and then, the service is interrupted and conversation falls silent. I don’t blame southwest or zappos or dell when twitter goes down.

Though, if micro blogging is used as a client’s one and only form of communication during, say, a crisis, then it’s worth assessing the reliability of the service.

Using twitter in concert with a menu of social media tools probably makes the most sense for those worried about reliability.

It’s hard to answer without a well defined communications objective in mind. Though, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking ourselves these questions.

Great post.

By: Rich Reader

Rich Reader — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:03:34 +0000

A a good social media strategy necessarily dictates that corporate social media participation programs set the right scale/level-of-effort/budget of tracking, research, content creation, discussions, relationship development, and continuous follow-through in multiple external sites, tools, and offline face-to-face events. Reliance on only one or two such avenues of social media engagement is certainly an unwise lightweight position, as well as a guaranteed plan for program failure.

Furthermore, it’s necessary to backup your external content and interactions in a safe, reliable, & secure system for archive and retrieval.

How well do your social media objectives and programs align to this guidance?

By: Jeremiah Staes

Jeremiah Staes — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:17:26 +0000

I think there a couple places of weakness – but this post mostly talks about the technical reliability of such services.

And to that there is a simple answer – if you are using a free service, you can’t truly expect reliability or consistency.

This is one of the litany of reasons why I advise folks not to the use Youtube version for their embedded corporate video in their own site, or to launch a corporate blog on Blogger, for instance.

Twitter, however, can be great as an outreach tool if your target market uses it. You should still have a backup in place, though. The Fail Whale will inevitably return.

Now, some implementations like WordPress on a self-hosted site with some upgrades can actually be pretty good… I’ve met $50,000+ CMS solutions which their WYSIWYG has the same issues or worse as WP, which can be mostly handled if you throw in the right plugins.