Monday, October 20, 2008

Social media is NOT free

Jennifer Leggio has an interesting post on social media; but I have to disagree with this assertion:
Can you do any of this for free? Are there people on your team or other teams who are social media savvy who would love the visibility of a cutting edge project?


This flack
is on record as recommending that companies encourage their employees to participate in social media and frequently holds up the Microsoft bloggers as an example. But this is not free, it is an additional duty for these workers for which they should receive recognition.

The job of the social media consultant is to help develop a company blogging policy (explaining what is meant by don't be stupid), provide tips for blogging platforms, and, most critically, monitoring the blogosphere to alert the company of any controversy they need to respond to and what that response should be.

However, I love the quote from Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com, “We don’t really think of social media as a marketing channel; that would be kind of like asking about ROI on answering phones.”

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