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.