The resignation of two bloggers who had been blogging on behalf of the John Edwards campaign last week because they “offended” the campaign and wrote off message brought back memories of the social media blunders of Wal-Mart, GM and Virgin.
If you are a business and you want to be successful operating within the social networks, then you need to understand when you elect to participate in social networks that you are engaging in a two way conversation.
Done right, social network conversation can be fun, engaging, helpful and authentic. As with user-generated reviews, not everyone will say good things about you or your product all the time. That is ok. The question of how successful you will be with social networking is how to you react to negative comments or off-message topics. Do you pack up your site and run from the first signs on negative or controversial feedback and/or reviews or do you continue to the conversation and offer your site of the story?
Media agencies (and obviously some political operatives) really struggle with the concept of social networking. They know that is something cool with as lot of buzz and that they should to offer it to their clients. But they are so used to framing the discussion and image of a brand (or person), that there first reaction to off-message conversation or disagreement is too end the discussion.
If you are not willing to engage in a true two-way conversation then social networking should not be part of your marketing strategy. It is better to not engage at all, then to fail miserably at the first signs of criticism.
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