Social Media @ Work

You want to revitalize your brand’s “voice.” You want to enter into a conversation with the public that consumes your product or service. You want raise public awareness of your organization for almost no outlay of money. You may want to jump into the social media fray and start a blog for your organization.

Getting the okay to start an official, company-sanctioned blog may take some doing, however. Your organization will likely have people who don’t know what a blog is, to those who furtively check Perez Hilton daily. A “blog”—an online publication with datelined posts—encompasses so many different kinds of outfits, from a mommy blogging about Junior’s first words to the Huffington Post, that perhaps it’s natural that the concept strikes fear in the powers-that-be in many a company.

Starting a blog is a worthwhile endeavor for many outfits, however. And you can put your organization on the couch, listen to its fears and allay them. Here is the heads up on some of the objections you’ll encounter and how to deal with them head on.

Organizational fear #1: What happens when we can’t control what the public says about us?

This, I would say is the # 1 fear organizations have about social media: if we give people the ability to comment on what we are do, what if they use our site to say bad things about us? Leave this part out of your spiel to the bosses, but the days of completely controlling the public’s ability to talk smack about your brand or product is over. Social media has put a lot of power in the hands of users. So you’re either in or you’re out—you’re using social media to spark, leverage, and maintain positive chatter, or you’re letting the public completely define who you are in the social media space.

But what will soothe this key fear? A few precautions will help you:

• First, make sure that people have to register to comment. This will weed out the vast majority of people who are out to cause problems in comments.
• Work with a lawyer to hammer out a solid “Terms and Conditions” policy that establishes the community standards for your site. Yes, it’s the mousetype that no one reads, but in the unlikely event that anything goes wrong, it’s the policy that indemnifies your company against bad actors. Assure the head honchos that malicious commenting on an organizational blog is actually very unlikely. Chances are what you post won’t be the most controversial stuff in the world, and thus unlikely to start a flame war.
• Realize your worst enemies are going to be spammers, who are easy enough to deal with via sophisticated spam catching software.
• Do establish monitoring of commenting activity on your blog, but recognize the real risks are actually very few

Organizational fear #2: What if no one comments on our posts? Doesn’t that mean we are a failure?

The fear above has a flipside: the fear of launching a blog and then hearing nothing but crickets. As blogs aren’t traditional marketing or traditional PR, you have to carefully manage your bosses’ expectations about what they can and can’t do.

Blogs that aren’t updated frequently won’t catch fire. Blogs that don’t offer their readers any value—that is to say, do nothing but promote the organization—won’t get you far in the online space. But even when you attain a measure of success with an organizational blog, you may not get a tremendous amount of comments.

Why not? First, remember that it’s only a tiny slice of the readers of any site that actually take the time to participate—some experts put it at 10%. Second, commenters are drawn to provocative, controversial content, something that an organizational blog will likely not cultivate.

Finally, remember that the number of comments aren’t the only way of judging the impact and influence of a blog. Number of visits certainly matters, and so does the number of links you receive from other sites. Are other sites talking about you? Can you use your blog to make ripples across several social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? When you are using a blog to cultivate awareness and affinity for your organization, sometimes it’s these trickier measures that mean the most.

To survive and thrive, a blog has to be lively, but remember to take in a full range of different metrics when looking at the success of your blog.

Organizational fear #3: We have a really established “voice” and we can’t be messing around with that.

Moving from a “read-only” culture from a new digital age “read/write” culture has moved once sacred branded properties into the hands of consumers, Lawrence Lessig writes about this in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Today, your brand has to live on platforms you don’t own like Facebook and Myspace. Its needs to, in other words, learn to speak new languages. A blog is one way to take your “voice” down a peg and make it a little more accessible to the consumers who are currently dying to interact with you.

Organizational fear #4: Aren’t successful blogs always driven by a single personality?

Many of the most popular bloggers—Dooce, Perez Hilton—have carved out their fame on their individuality. However, when you look at Technorati’s ranking of top blogs, group blogs are all over it: Life Hacker, Boing Boing, Gawker et all.

Whether your organization blog is voiced by a single person or several employees is a key decision that will affect the way your blog is perceived. There is no right answer to the question of how your blog’s “voice” should be defined. It’s an evolving process—chances are you’ll go through a process of trial and error before getting it right. And that’s okay—that’s what blogs are for. The bottom line is that any blog, even an organizational one, should have a personality, even if that personality belongs to the collective.

Organizational fear #5: Won’t this take our employees away from more important work?

Because blogs are rather informally written, people sometimes underestimate their power in reaching out to an organization’s audience. And it’s true that blog don’t write themselves. They take a lot of care and feeding in order to survive—a person or group who are willing to champion the medium as a way of connecting with new audiences and building a new channel of communication. Building a quality conversation with your audience—especially in the social media saturated world we live in—isn’t just important work, it’s critical.

Amanda McCormick maintains the filmlinc blog for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

This post is tagged Amanda McCormick, Blogging, Facebook, social media at work, Twitter