Common concerns of using web 2.0 as part of the communication mix

I’ve made a few presentations recently to introduce the power of the internet and to encourage resistant organisations to introduce a social media strategy into their communication mix. Being a self-confessed social media freak, it’s good to be confronted with old communication thinking, as it’s easy to forget that indeed there is still a lot of fear, confusion and disbelief from those who don’t ‘get’ web 2.0.

One comment I heard recently is the fear of ‘lack of control’ over their communications if they went online. The answer is yes indeed the traditionalists are controlling THEIR communication outwards which might get picked up by journalists. Controlling who says what and ensuring messages are carefully crafted is one thing, but they are not influencing THE conversation. The conversation and opinions continuously circulating out there, 24/7, on the web. If you don’t engage and join THAT conversation, it carries on without you. That thought fills me with fear and keeps me focussed.

‘Blogging, Twitter, FaceBook, bookmarking, RSS, tools, tools, which ones to use?’ Forget the tools, listen to the conversation taking place online. Find out who’s saying what, where they are saying it, who’s following them, what kind of content are they circulating around. Then from that decide a strategy and objectives to add value or a new perspective.

‘But we are going to get abused online with aggressive comments’. Well if only! In fact once you start blogging you’ll find that comments can be few and far between. Before launching online it’s imperative to set rules of engagement and make them public. For example repetitive or abusive comments will not be published. These rules are not only for your visitors but also for you. Blogging is about opinions but shouldn’t be emotional or speculative. Everything should be fact-based and where possible linking to the source to support your point of view. If you don’t honour your own rules, then be prepared for public disgrace.

‘It’s misleading to say that you can just publish information and it’s then in front of your audience’. OK agreed. If you organise a party but don’t tell anyone, you’re going to be dancing alone. So you need to put your content, be it a blog, website, forum, etc, on a search engine friendly platform. You also need to register your blog with blog search engines and offer RSS and an email subscription function. Don’t forget to inform your database of stakeholders by email. Most importantly, use the right language to ensure your information is picked up in your audience’s alerts and feeds. If your organisation only talks about H2O and but your audience searches on water, you’re wasting your time.

Time, now that’s a contentious issue. Another regular comment is the amount of time needed to engage online. Again, agreed. There is no silver bullet to this one, but building relationships off-line is just as time consuming. The courting of a stakeholder isn’t done in one meeting, it can take months, even years to build trust. But the advantage I see online is that as you build relationships and networks, and as stakeholders begin to value your contribution to a discussion, you are also sharing this content with everyone else too, which is lost in off-line discussions and events. The sooner more organisations value social media’s contribution to overall communications, there should be a better allocation of staff time to online engagement.

I appreciate that’s it’s a huge challenge to convince senior management to believe that the internet is not just a playground for their teenage children, but is in fact the biggest ongoing knowledge and networking party ever to take place and I know where I want to be.

The video is slightly out of date when it mentions MySpace. FaceBook, its competitor, is now more than double the size with 175 million active users. In February 2009 FaceBook had 276 million visitors compared to MySpace which had 124 million. But combined that’s 400 million visitors in one month on just two social networking sites.