Keep up with the conversationThe Social Web – Be yourself… or find someone who is.
I recently read and commented on one of the many great blog posts out there that give advice on how companies approach the social web, in this article Kevin Gibbons lays down some basics – have a purpose, write well, be transparent and to basically be nice to your audience.
All great points. My comment was to be yourself, be a person.
In my experience, the social web seems to be much more people centric than the rigid old days of communicating over the web through fairly static ‘brochureware’ sites and brand engagement built around established channels of marketing, sales and support.
Over the social web people will respond to you being you rather than a faceless corporate. There is also the old saying that ‘people buy from people’ and the social web gives you a great opportunity to return to this personal engagement.
But a few days after making the comment, it occurred to me it’s not as straightforward as that – who best represents ‘you’ as a company, as a brand?
Your CEO? Whilst he probably embodies ‘you’ as a financial entity, the acceptable face of ‘you’ to the city, to the accountants, he may not resonate with the people who buy your products. Alright, there are exceptions, but not every company has a Steve Jobs at the helm. Similarly one of your talented engineers may be able to out geek a darkened room of Metallica fans – but is he you?
How about this from the blogs of ZDNet – Is it time for a Chief Social Media Officer? of putting someone at the C-level to sort it all out?
The answer will be different in every company and is probably dictated more by the kind of audience you have – but it seems to me that companies should invest time in finding and enabling whoever is ‘you’ in the organization and encouraging them to contribute to your website, tweet, blog, set up discussion groups etc, give them the time and maybe the title to do that.
There is inevitably more than one ‘you’ - a social web strategy should consider relevancy as of course ‘you’ are different to different audiences and those different audiences will be on different channels.
The stock exchange know you are innovative, but ultimately safe and the CEO creating a MySpace page will do nothing to enhance ‘you’. But if you sell skateboards and your cool new intern likes to video himself throwing himself off the steps of the town hall for some ‘gnarly’ moves – then his MySpace page probably will.
So, be yourself and if you can’t do that, find the people who are.
Authenticity from Tom Smith's Drawing Board
Update 20th April 09 — cartoon kindly contributed by Tom Smith, see more from the drawing board of Tom Smith here
I agree. A doodle is worth a thousand words
http://nowhereware.com/doodles/drawing/authenticity.jpg/
Great post Ian. In recent experiences a former employer of mine ( http://www.cobweb.com ) has done a great job at this by using blogging to give a personable public face to their company beyond the relatively static facade of their website. Their approach of empowering all levels of the organisation to blog about different aspects of the company is a strong one and has enabled ‘web publishing’ to be pushed beyond the marketing department in useful and meaningful ways.
The main site actually runs on Immediacy – which has been great for crucial Search Optimisation needs – but a best of breed approach was adopted for the blogging element
I’m not sure I agree with the basic thrust of this. If you (or a client ) are honestly wanting to have real conversations with real customers then IT HAS to be the client that does this ( dirty ) job.
Otherwise you always get those situations when a real person asks, “So, what about BS5308 eh?” and you (the fake them) really don’t have a clue what to reply.
[...] a suggestion to ‘be yourself’ and then I had a bit of think about it and published this article on our company blog. The theme of which was to either be yourself and come across as a real person, or to find those [...]
Hi Ian, Nice post. I think “be nice” is a good mantra for life in general but I like my colleague Ged Carroll’s additional one for online “be useful”.
Being useful is where all the different “yous” come in – I am assuming you are meaning the “faces” to the company can come from anywhere within the organisation here?
…and they should…..technical people need to be there, customer services, marketing, comms, senior management….
I like the thesis number 84. from the Cluetrain Manifesto as it sums it up perfectly: “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”
As people realise the biggest benefit to being online – listening to your customers and being part of their community – is learning intensely valuable info about where you business should be going and what you should be doing better, this will become a no brainer. Right now there are a huge number of companies that still don’t get it.
[...] 20, 2009 An interesting post from my client at Alterian – Ian Truscott – on the power of being yourself or as a company, letting [...]
Ah.. no.. sorry Tom – that’s not what I am suggesting, I think the most important bit of social web advice is transparency and as you say it so easy to be found out if you aren’t and then it’s a long way back from there. I was really talking about those advocate and knowledgeable voices within your organisations. Folks like http://twitter.com/ChrisBatDell – who represent an organisation to a certain community within your audience, that they have an affinity with.
[...] The Social Web – Be yourself… or find someone who is. [...]
I realize this is a post from April, and therefore I’m a little late to the conversation. I will suggest though that in the last 9 months the point driven home by the author has been even more applicable. During the mess in the United States over the auto industry, General Motors and Chrysler attempted to rely on traditional media and CEO’s … not Ford, they allowed their Chief Social Media Officer unfettered access to the actual decisions and leadership.
Ford today is making money, and the other two are socialized companies going the way of our Postal Service and Amtrak, into government subsidy oblivion.