There's no fun quite like the period immediately after a new communications medium rises to prominence. While marketers awkwardly experiment with ways to bend the new medium to suit their mass marketing needs, we see a lot of cautious toe-dipping, overambitious power plays, and failed campaigns. It's an exciting time to be in the marketing business.
It's easy to critique a company that tries and fails within social media. It's a popular internet pastime to look at approaches to social campaigns, critique them (often accompanied by heavy sarcasm), and explain how your approach would have been better. But what if you're a marketing professional who has been given the rather challenging task of "figuring out" social media for your organization? It's not so funny without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.
I can't make recommendations concerning your company's approach to social media without an intimate knowledge of your business and its goals. No one can. However, there are a number of pitfalls -- social media "campaign killers," if you will -- that ought to be avoided at all costs. Falling into any one these traps will result in a "face-palm" as your social media campaign withers and dies. Here they are.
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