You've put a lot of effort into hiring good people for your
organization. Trust them and turn them loose, and they're the ones who
will be building important relationships for your organization online.
That lesson is driven home by an article in the New York Times. The Times says big brands are having trouble justifying their investment in social-network advertising.
what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising
work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to
spend time with friends, not brands.
home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little
attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an
online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad
“is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored
entirely.”
The trouble is not the medium; it's the message. I've written before that people expect your organization to participate on social networks. But that participation should not be merely about your organization. It should be about the people in your organization.
When you're putting together a social networking "strategy," always be thinking in terms of people. Don't post to Twitter in the name of your organization. Pick someone who's a good communicator, and have that person post for herself, on behalf of the organization. If you have a blog, don't post anonymous, institutional essays. Put a personal face on what you're writing.
The important point is that people, not brands, build relationships. That's true online as much as in person.
