Social Media Mistakes
Case studies too often focus on what was done and why it was done well, but it is just as valuable to learn from others mistakes, particularly in the newER area of Social Media. So, needless to say, I was happy to see that David Spark threw up a post last week on Mashable.com that listed blunders made by “Social Media Gurus.” The post shared a handful of valuable stories (and a couple funny ones - like David Meerman Scott’s Facebook goof). I’ve pointed out a few of these below, but you can also check out the rest of the post here.
DON’T Send a specially selected mass mailing to your friends - Susan Bratton, co-founder and CEO of Personal Life Media, is still having a problem trying to scale individual relationships with social media. Even when she pares down her mailing list of 8,000 to a personally selected mailing of 250, she still gets nasty messages telling her to “take me off this list”.
DON’T Post a comment on your own Facebook profile wall - David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR and the upcoming book World Wide Rave, needed his teenage daughter to point out his massive social networking faux pas. After setting up his Facebook profile, he showed it to his daughter to which she responded, “You’re not supposed to write on your own wall. You’re such a dork, dad”.
DON’T Over-architect a site with features and content without talking to your customers - Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, fell into the trap of making too many assumptions about what an audience wanted and just started developing a site loaded with features and functionality. Its what happens when you work at a big company and you don’t see outside of the four walls of the organization. Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.
DON’T Be overly careful about everything you say online - Futurist Thornton May claims he still falls into the trap of self-editorializing when writing online. Even though May understands that what makes social media valuable is that its authentic, real, and unfinished, he still is extremely careful about what he says and that takes the edge off his online persona. He blames his age and says people of his generation are not familiar nor necessarily comfortable engaging in online discussions.
Now, in the spirit of self-disclosure, its only right that I point out a blunder of my own….waiting until a week after Mashable posted this entry to actually blog about it! It’s been real busy the past couple months and, therefore, somewhat challenging to carve out the usual time to blog, but when the next story or post that I want to share rolls around, I’ll make a point to post in a more timely fashion.
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