Avoid social media mistakes: forget the technology and focus on the task

Good reminder not to enrapture oneself with the socialmedia toolset. I’d offer one tempering comment, though. Whether we like it or not, McLuhan’s old saw, “the media is the message” still holds. If you’re not into the media for its own sake, at least to some degree, it’s unlikely to hold an appeal.

The form/content dichotomy, at least in most of western culture has denigrated form, that content is what counts.

Socialmedia, on the other hand, has a poetic dimension, calling upon the imagination to fuse form and content, goals and process. It’s like that old figure of not being able to tell the dancer from the dance.

For all that I agree with your angle, but we also need that spice of socialmedia which is unmotivated, spontaneous, and free.

Always read your thoughts with interest!

bob

Who (b) is really important – and it’s not the kind of thing traditional comms people think about, as most comms can normally be briefed out to an agency.

I come across the same enthusiasm about tools and there’s normally a reasonable justification for why social media is appropriate to the audience, and sometimes for the task too. But there’s rarely an appreciation that you can’t outsource this stuff like you would with traditional comms, so embracing the tools means being willing to engage, usually in a fairly open-ended way, with the people at the other end of them.

The rather cheesy line I’ve been trotting out lately is that interactive websites are no use without interactive organisations behind them.

In a subsequent conversation, you also need, of course, to broach the ‘how’, which is where I’ve been trying to use a more structured approach to managing the information and technology risk using a structured set of questions:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6348008/Risk-Assessment-for-Social-Media-v2

Comments/ideas gratefully received.

The audience/commitment/objective questions are another reason why I love the social media game so much – they help people form the answers, and then choose the appropriate tools, almost without realising it.

Reposting on the right topic, with apologies for the mess:

That’s a really good piece of advice, which rings a lot of bells for me. And goes way beyond just social media but to almost any project where clients are getting fixated by getting into the “shiny new thing.” I had similar experiences way back when it was merely a plain website that was that Shiny New Thing.

My strategy tends to be the question “Why”, at least two or three times of each successive answer, and sometimes as many as five to really get under the skin of the requirements. Sometimes it can irritate clients who think I’m being difficult or obtuse or just plain obstructive, but it invariably works and gets you to the point where you can start the who-what-when-where-how journalistic stage.

Sometimes it endorses the original plan, but often it doesn’t – or at least changes it to a significant degree. Either way, most clients seem to appreciate the value of the process in the end. Or so they tell me!

@Bob you’re right – and it’s certainly a problem trying to make it work when people aren’t excited.

@Steph – I like that line, cheesy or not. It’s a tall order for people in digital comms teams to be trying to make their organisation become more interactive, but this is the situation we find ourselves in! I love the checklist, will remix it for CLG. Slightly uncomfortable about bureaucratizing this stuff – but the risks do need thinking about in a structured way.

@Dave I’m jealous that Steph saw the social media game in action at the UK Youth Online thing and I am yet to. Let me know if you’re doing it again soon at something I can crash.

@Andrew – Definitely needs more whys. I’ve been (unjustly!) called obstructive a few times in my career too. One of these people I subsequently married, mind you. So I must have done something right.

I might be doing something with Andrew and his colleagues at COI soon. Maybe you can join in too!

[...] Avoid social media mistakes: forget the technology and focus on the task – Neil Williams on getting the context for the tools right. [...]

I encountered another one of these just last week: a very strong-headed customer wanting to create a fully-featured social network that would be ‘self sustaining’. Ie, that she can walk away from… I am working on her

Avoid the mistakes for sure, but sometimes it’s OK to fail too! If you never try nuthin’ you’ll never know better. Recognising where things haven’t worked so well is also another way to tackle the hows and the whys. Here’s a nice post on Embracing failure from the flipside of the world…

Ooh that’s a great post Amy, thanks for sharing it. Will add that blog to my reader. Absolutely – failure is a good option. Start small, fail small, succeed big. I recently highlighted the Defra vandalised wiki as a positive case study for that very reason… failure isn’t necessarily a show-stopper. You just respond in a human, honest way then move on to the next experiment.