The 7 deadly sins of social media

Stuart Ridley
26 September 2008
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Photo credit: Killanoodle

Want to know all the best ways of marketing to social media? Just avoid all stupid mistakes big businesses have made trying to turn the blogosphere into the flogosphere, writes Stuart Ridley.

Social media is incredibly hot right now, but it’s hardly a new trend. The internet has always been about people sharing personal and social information about their day-to-day lives, passions, work, relationships and beliefs.
The generations who have grown up with internet access recognise the freedom of being the natural citizens of a global, connected community.

This worldwide discussion group is the most powerful channel for mass mind expansion and it’s freely available. A billion conversations about the things in life that matter... and a whole lot of trivia. It’s an accelerated learning experience for anyone who wants to get it.

As a business owner, if you want to tap into the conversation, you need to give your audience what they want and do it well. Get it right, and your audience will gain a sense of ownership of your social media efforts. They’ll want to promote it. They’ll enjoy a spirit of group energy, a sense of belonging, which can ultimately help your business, grow.

Get it wrong and they’ll lampoon you, diss you and embarrass your company. That’s the catch: online audiences participating in social media are free to express their opinions and talk with human voices. This humanness can rub uncomfortably against businesses’ desire to control communications.

My advice: get over it and take look at ways you can have a go.

1 Forgetting what it means to be human

No one was surprised when, earlier this year, Microsoft disclosed that its ‘problogger’, Parker, was in fact the creation of a crack team of PR hacks. The blogger who claimed to be “just a guy with a computer and good intentions” keen to promote instant messaging and donations to social causes had been carefully sculpted by a natty little group called the i’m initiative team (note the suitably whimsical lowercase i). You can check out Parker’s posey blog, and the PR team’s sheepish admission, at imtalkathon.com external link .

Would it have killed Microsoft to pay one real person to work on the campaign and avoid the ‘pretend human’ PR disaster?

You and I know that to engage other humans, we need to think, act and speak like a genuine human being. That last word is the big clue here: it helps to be human. It’s OK to make mistakes – even silly ones, such as spelling errors, as long as you come across as genuine.

Like the social interaction concepts of ‘cool’ and ‘smart’, humanity can’t be faked. So be real and start engaging conversations.

Engaged audiences can be worth more to your business. It’s not merely about grabbing their attention, it’s also about expanding the attention span, converting it into curiosity, interest, opinion and yes…desire, into action.

2 Being a bully

Imagine you own the United States licensing rights to a board game. Say, Scrabble. You’ve had several cracks at making an online version but they all failed because they weren’t much fun to play. Then a couple of programmers, Rayat and Jayant Agarwalla, launch a knock-off called Scrabulous which works really, fabulously well, and becomes insanely popular on Facebook.

To protect the market rights for your own Facebook version of Scrabble, which no one likes because it’s awkward to play, you threaten to sue and generally make life hell. You try to bully the brothers into submission, preferably out of business.

Why? OK, so their version of Scrabble attracts ad money and yours doesn’t, but is that a good enough reason? What will your target audience think if you stop them playing a game they enjoy? They’ll hate you and boycott your products (in all formats).

And that’s precisely what happened to Hasbro when it tried to force the removal of Scrabulous from Facebook entirely. The brothers Agarwalla worked out a way to get around the US restrictions, while Scrabulous fans organised petitions, spread the word on Hasbro’s bullying tactics and stayed loyal to the game they love.

3 Being boring

A few years ago, your correspondent had a gig ghost-writing blogs for a handful of C-level execs in corporate land. I sucked at it. By the time I had read the brief from the marketroid, I’d already switched into automaton mode and banged out a couple hundred words of bland.

Realising my horrible mistake, I tried to encourage the execs to have a go themselves. Unfortunately, they soon lost enthusiasm and hired PR trainees to do it for them with predictably yawn-a-delic results.
Businesses need to talk about a range of topics in their blogs if they want to be interesting – you can’t rehash press releases or brochures. Blogs should share stories, insights, links and your personality.

According to Forrester research published in July 2008, most business-to-business blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion” because they toe the corporate line too closely. Forrester discovered 70% of blogs owned by Fortune 500 companies stuck to business or tech topics, three quarters failed to draw comments from their audiences and more than half lazily regurgitated press releases. Boring, boring, boring.

Never mind, cheer yourself up at the awesomely stupid failblog.org external link .

4 Overestimating your audience size

Too many businesses aim for quantity over quality when launching their social media marketing campaigns. Yes, you can use all kinds of tricks to attract online audiences, but raw audience numbers based on total visitors aren’t worth diddly.

Perhaps if a decent percentage of that audience chooses to engage with your business online regularly, you might be able to persuade them to give you some money. But just because they’ve signed up, doesn’t mean they’re hot to spend. Think of all the news feeds, blogs, newsletters and trial software you’ve signed up for.
Half the time you probably didn’t mean to, but forgot to tick the box, or untick it, when you were filling in yet another form.

All those companies consider you a customer now: you’re on their mailing lists and have been categorised somewhere in their customer relationship management systems. But until you re-engage, you’re not a customer. A potential one maybe, but hardly committed.

In a July 2008 blog post at avc.blogs.com external link , Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, explains the difference between subscribers and daily users.

“This blog has, according to FeedBurner, 133,000 RSS subscribers. That’s a big number. But the number of people who read this blog via the feed every day averages less than 4,000.