On being Social Media-Capable

For the next couple of months, I will be part of a project that will introduce, rather brusquely, the concepts of User Generated Content, Social Media and Community to a small company’s very traditional e-commerce culture.

What I’m slightly anxious of is the fact that, from what I feel and what I have observed in preliminary meetings is that the company expects the Social Media, Community and User-Generated Content aspect of their e-commerce business to be built instead of being cultivated.

Additionally, I noticed the following, if I may, “fears” from the company which tell me that their perspective as far as social media is concerned might be skewed just enough to doom the project to failure:

• Customers will be given a voice. We’re hoping to “moderate” this voice as negative feedback will surely hurt our brand.
• This is not going to make money is it?
• Who’s going to manage it?

This is rather sad. I feel that before a company takes the social media plunge, it must, first, perform a serious assesment of its determination to change itself to become “social-media-capable”–They need to ask themselves if their culture can successfully leverage a medium that is built around genuine relationships. Otherwise, the entire effort will be nothing more than a mediocre mess of outsourced, not crowdsourced, content; fake twitter accounts and Youtube and Facebook accounts that serve as playgrounds of insignificant value for inexperienced marketers within the organization.

Now, to answer the questions above:

Customers will be given a voice. Think about it this way: Somewhere else on the internet, some of your customers are already talking about how crappy they think your product or service is; some of them are already suggesting features–wouldn’t you rather have these conversations happening in your domain where you can manage their feedback better and where you can provide a more direct response to them and open dialogues? You would.

This is not going to make money is it? It may or it may not. But there are countless other things you can gain from this initiative: Like opening a new channel of communication for your customer-facing departments; or “humanizing” your CEO.

Who’s going to manage it? Definitely You.

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