Social Media – More Threat Than Opportunity

You can’t have missed the tsunami of social media hype that’s built over the last few months. Everywhere we look there’s mention of Twitter and Facebook. Even on breakfast TV they talk about what this or that particular celebrity has posted.

This morning in the UK we had somebody complain about Sarah Brown, wife to the Prime Minister, tweeting mundane stuff when she could have been giving us the inside story from the G20. Regularly MSNBC Countdown helps us all giggle at what Sarah Palin has posted on her Facebook profile.

These services started out as platforms for small groups of younger people to share the more mundane details of their lives – “What are you doing?” on Twitter and “What’s on your mind?” on Facebook.

Now they’ve grown to the point where a whole community of “would be” consultants is pitching the need for businesses to be “engaged” in social media. The message is business leaders need to participate and share in order to be liked and sell. And of course they need to hire these self acclaimed experts to help them do it. Being stuffy, boring business guys they won’t understand the power of relationships.

We’ve been trying this stuff out for most of the last year. We’ve met some genuine, interesting people and we’ve come across an awful lot of charlatans. We’ve found Twitter an interesting service for monitoring what’s being said and Facebook a convenient way of keeping up with our distributed family.

We haven’t found participation in either significantly enhances our ability to sell stuff.

Tempting as it would be, we won’t be abandoning our social media activities any day soon. Keeping up appearances takes a lot of time and more than a lot of tolerance, given all the rubbish contributed by the “experts”. But it has to be done, for two reasons.

We may not win business in social media, but we can certainly lose it in a heartbeat. Twitter is by far the easiest medium for complaining about anything, and people do all of the time. Twitter enables the right of reply, but a complaint that goes unanswered for even a couple of hours can go around the world and stay on the web forever.

The first place we bitch about anything is Twitter – a 140 character rant takes seconds and permanently hurts the reputation of the subject. The more aware businesses are monitoring the stream. They quickly, and publicly with @replies, offer to help address the issue. The less aware don’t even know it’s happened and obviously don’t care.

With social media, complainers have a platform with which they can humiliate brands.

Recent examples are the guy whose guitar was broken by United’s baggage handlers. He wrote a song, made a video posted on You Tube, and got published by mainstream TV. Nobody cares that United subcontract to baggage handlers. All we know now is the brand busted the guitar and wouldn’t accept responsibility for the damage.

The other example worthy of mention is the woman with the Bank of America credit card. On a balance she obviously couldn’t clear BoA jacked the interest rate to near 30% (when our governments are driving rates down close to zero). She made her complaint public, with a YouTube video and now the world knows about it. Mainstream media picked up the story and made it headline news. Now we all, having suspected the banks we’re ripping us off to pay their own bonuses, know that to be true.

So my take on this social media phenomenon isn’t that it gives brands a new, free, way to promote their offer. It is a way for those who are disadvantaged by their processes to let the world know about it.

The tsumani is actually customer power.

As a result of the guitar guy airlines might start insisting handling agents take better care of our luggage and banks might get more government imposed regulation.

As consumers we’ll all be better off.

Big brands are in trouble. Social media isn’t a platform for their advertising. It’s a medium for customers to complain, and tell the world about it.

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