More Than a Recommendation

Social tools have become less like recommendations or reviews to friends and have become a fountain of information that can be found anywhere covering anything. With the emergence of blogs, Facebook groups, and review sites like Yelp searchers can stubble on upon personal opinion about a product or organization in question.

Now enters the corporate bloggers. Corporate blogging is something that is catching on in the blogosphere slowly, but surely. Why would an organization not want to beat the end-user to the punch in product review? Whobetter to review the offering than the creator? However, there is a catch. As an organization you have to be willing to take a few punches and have a set of processes in tact for inflammatory comments. As an organization you have to be willing to be transparent and honest with your customer base. If there has been one thing proven its bloggers and customer are not stupid and can see through the curtain.

There is an inherent risk with corporate blogging but, the opportunity is great and benefits can be noticed early in the cycle. With a corporate blog you have open customer service which benefits everyone, a platform to openly talk about your offerings (yes, even there short comings), and transform your website into a personal experience for clients/customers. 

The value is there, but are you willing to be honest with yourself and your customers?     

Corporate Social Buy In

With corporations beginning to utilize social tools in marketing and PR efforts, who is shouldering the responsibility of committing others? With the countless tools out there to make a company or subject matter expert popular, who informs them their time is now confiscated for social outreach? Now that we have social tools so easily accessible as they are we as PR/marketing folks naturally plan elaborate campaigns and wonderful plans for these tools. But, sometimes that’s as far as our participations goes. Where does the rest of the work come from?
Well, co-workers, the actual subject matter experts, and the corporate heads. Now, to coincide with other initiatives you are stuck with asking more out of representatives to fulfill not only the usual campaign A, but also the new and wonderful campaign B. This could raise some concerns with participants who are not familiar with the format or comfortable with the life cycle of a social campaign killing any plans.
This is where we come in and introduce the mediums available to a social campaign to build comfort and pitch the plan like any other plan to maximize everyone’s abilities. If you have any uncertainties in the process or unable to answer questions the plan dies again. Making us as professionals responsible for building our understanding to make sure the plans and goals we have set with social PR can be met with knowledge and understanding to pass along to the big hitters. An asset like social media outlets are neither something to pass up nor something to be taken lightly. There is value here and we are responsible to showing decision makers the value.