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bastards

Todd swings on the bastardization of social media. Well worth a read and a challenge to all of us on the corporate side.  The primary challenge for any corporation in engaging in the blogosphere is overcoming what Todd rightly notes:

They didn’t want to be part of the conversation; they wanted to be the topic of the conversation”

He also points to some of the common flaws:

    • The blogs only spoke to tiny special-interest niches of the brand’s humongous audience…
    • Many of the company’s previous forays into Social Media had been both disjointed and blithely abandoned (and yet were still easy to find)…
    • The company’s name was being abused by SEO scammers…
    • Some of their best stuff was simply hard to find…

We’re taking-up his challenge of engaging 1:1 at Dell. We’ve just appointed our first VP of communities and conversations – Bob – and built a 40+ person team around him whose sole job is to engage 1:1 all day long.  It’s a start.

One Response

  1. By Todd Defren on January 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 am

    And it’s an excellent start, Andy. Dell has certainly gotten high marks for learning all the impt lessons from the Dell Hell episode: probably among the best things to ever happen to the company, in retrospect.

    Wishing you (and Bob) all the best kinds of luck in ’08!

    p.s. – Really pleased and surprised that you have the time to keep PR-Squared in your RSS reader. 😉

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