October 25th, 2010
Blogs go corporate
by Ben LaMothe, in Blogging, Consumer Trends
Two weeks ago I was a visiting lecturer at my alma mater, Central Michigan University. Over the course of three days, I spoke to about 16 different classes. It was an exhausting experience, but I also learned a lot in the process.
I talked a lot about Facebook, Twitter and foursquare during my lectures. However one lecture seemed to focus largely on blogs. The class I spoke to had a very (in my opinion) extreme view about the value and long-term value of blogging.
One student suggested that people no longer have the attention span for blogs; that anything beyond 140-characters is more than many can handle.
I countered by suggesting that while personal, Here’s-What-I-Did-Today blogging may be falling by the wayside, corporate blogging is experiencing a major surge.
There’s a disturbing trend currently taking hold in social media marketing and community management. Businesses are hiring firms to develop their social profiles, but aren’t asking anything else. They aren’t asking what the progress is, aren’t asking for data points, referral information or engagement stats.
Businesses aren’t asking for a return on their investment. They’re just ticking off the “social media” box on their media plans and moving forward. While I’m sure plenty of agencies are getting away with this, boosting their revenue because they aren’t being asked to provide anything resembling proof, I’m confident that this will do more harm than good to the industry, and indeed social media as a whole. It makes me glad that that, unlike many others, Renaissance Creative does not take that path.
Today Foursquare added a new feature to its web site: Buttons.
This means the most to businesses actively using Foursquare, because it makes it possible to create buttons for individual locations and embed them on a web site as a button. Here’s the official word from Foursquare’s blog:
As social media gained a foothold in the world of ecommerce, more buttons and widgets began appearing on web sites. The thing is, they were appearing in worthless places on the sites.
It became something of a web development standard to stick links to your company’s social media profiles at the bottom of the web site, where almost no-one will see them. That doesn’t work.
Photo Credit: Alana Fisher
With every online community, there exists some give-and-take between the members and those in charge of running and maintaining the community.
When a community is just starting out, there will be a period of experimentation where the users begin trying to understand how their membership in the community benefits them, and the community moderator understands what works and what does not, to encourage debate and involvement.
The process is similar when a previously dormant community, suddenly becomes less dormant and more active.
Community members become accustomed to a low level of engagement. So when activity and engagement increases, community members will react to it.
While not everyone reacts the same way to changes in a community they are a part of, the majority will react in one of three ways:
