Why are brands still afraid of social media?
September 25th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton
B.L. Ochman at Whatsnextblog did a great post this week titled ‘The Top Six Reasons Companies are Still Scared of Social Media’ it also made it onto Ad Age and has been shared on Twitter repeatedly.
The post is spot on in my opinion, and I especially related to points 2 and 3 from personal experience:
Haters will damage our brand.
“What about the haters?” is the first question that comes up at my corporate and conference social-media workshops. “What if people say bad, mean, nasty things about our brand?”
Well, there may be things you need to change about your brand, and in that case, you should thank them for letting you know what they are. Then you should make changes.
If you have built an online community that includes people who don’t hate you, that community will rise to your defense and they will handle the problem for you.
We’ll lose control of the brand.
Listen up: Every person with a computer and even a tiny skill level has the tools to make their opinion about your brand heard by other people. They’re already talking about you.
Message control is an illusion. Give it up.
Your workers are talking about you in closed Facebook groups designed to keep you out so they can talk about you in peace. Your customers are e-mailing, using Twitter and Facebook, and — that old standby — calling their friends about their experience with your brand. You don’t have control. You might as well join the conversation. At least that way you can influence what is being said.
The fear of losing control, or at least the illusion of control as B.L. rightly puts it, is probably the most common fear I’ve heard from brands, closely followed by this imaginary pack of angry customers that are just waiting for a brand to embrace social communications so that they can tell the world a pack of lies, or perhaps the truth - which could be worse.
To be honest, in the last six months or so there has been a dramatic drop in the fear factor in terms of the brands we speak to. This maybe because we’re talking to more digitally savvy brands in fairness, but I still think the fear factor is an issue, which begs the question: why?
Are there really that many horror stories out there about brands being bitten by social media? Not that I can find. There are stories of brands dipping an uneducated toe into social media and being bitten. Or worse still thinking they know it all and jumping in and quickly drowning. But this shouldn’t create fear of social media. It should promote awareness of taking social media seriously and investing the time into getting it right.
This is quite simply an education gap. We need to help to educate brands that this isn’t an either/or question, you can’t really opt out and say ‘nah, social media isn’t for me’, because the conversation is happening with or without you and the longer you bury your head in the sand the more opportunities you are wasting.
If you think there aren’t complaints out there it’s not because they don’t exist and you’ll be opening the flood gates by engaging with your community, it’s simply because you’re not listening. Whenever we run social media training sessions we do a quick audit on what’s being said around the brand in question and they are usually blissfully unaware of most of it.
So don’t confuse the issue, your brand has no choice in the situation. By not engaging you might as well be sitting in a room surrounded by your customers; some of whom are complaining, some of whom might be asking questions and others who may actually be praising and helping you, but all you are doing is shutting your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘la, la, la, I’m not listening to you!’
Surely that’s much more frightening for a business than opening your eyes, uncovering your ears and starting a conversation? It’s a simple lesson, but one that still needs to be learnt.
Tags: brands, education, fear, Social media
