I think that people optimising Social media don’t do it well because they don’t understand why they are doing it, who they are doing it for and how they are doing it. I don’t think it is wrong that they are thinking about it, but the methods are not great.

When you gave your standing in a bar analogy earlier where you were being constantly interrupted, I think you maybe hit the nail on the head. Social media is not the beer, it’s not the person interrupting you, it is not the barman. Social media is the bar. If you want a bar to work, you give it good ambience and you tailor it for your clients.

The same should be true of social media – you should give them an environment to talk about not the product or the brand, but about the subject. I’m sure there are enough beard websites out there where people would want to talk about how they like their beards, moustaches, side burns, etc where Gillette could listen in on conversations, occasionally spark their own topic (similar to theme nights in bars) and use the real estate to promote their brand. Will people click on the ads? No, of course they won’t. But they’ll remember the brand when they next go to the shop.

If the product is good enough, people will talk about it anyway and it is effectively providing a medium for the users to tell each other how good your products are. You shouldn’t need to do anything. And if you’re products are bad, then social media won’t help at all.

Creating a Gillette forum for people to talk about Gillette won’t work though. Creating a forum for people talk about razors or shaving foam won’t work either. It has to be the subject they are passionate about.

It’s somewhat amusing: there’s not much I disagree with in your post.

Except semantics.

My point is that great companies have always “listened” to and “engaged” with their customers.

You don’t need to monitor Twitter or Facebook to see what consumers are saying about you. Passive data such as sales, growth, marketshare, etc. gives you a pretty good idea of what consumers think. And traditional tools such as focus groups and controlled surveys are, in my opinion, far better at producing actionable data than trying to monitor everything that is said about you online.

When it comes to engagement, there’s meaningful engagement and there’s meaningless engagement.

A company that participates in some nebulous “conversation” for the sake of trying to influence consumers isn’t accomplishing anything and isn’t delivering anything of value to the consumer.

A company that is there to answer questions when asked engaging in a meaningful fashion. A company that is there to provide support when I need it is engaging in a meaningful fashion.

I think it really boils down to knowing who you are and where you are.

A corporation shouldn’t be trying to be my friend. It shouldn’t be trying to monetize the real estate in which I’m having a conversation with a human being.

It should provide me with quality products and services. It should be there to answer my questions. It should offer support when I need help with the products and services I’ve purchased.

At the end of the day, with no offense to the many decent people involved with “social media,” yourself included, I guess my question is simply – what exactly is new about what you’re doing?

It seems to me that the general notion that companies need to learn to “listen” and “engage” with consumers ignores the fact that good companies have been doing this for decades.

If you can repackage this and use new “tools” to do it and make money, more power to you. But I’d certainly pay attention to the fact that people in Ted McConnell’s position are asking questions.

Secondly, I disagree with your sentiments today and explain why on my company blog if you care to see (too long to paste here).

http://blogs.gcigroup.com/fineprint/2008/11/21/seller-meet-buyer-buyer-meet-seller/

Cheers,
John.