7 Deadly Sins of Social Media | PR 2.0 | Social Media Consulting

The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media

September 15th, 2008 | Written By: Jay Baer

As part of my panel on social media at the Worldcom PR conference in Montreal recently (see post below), I created these “7 Deadly Sins of Social Media.”

Are you willing to admit your sins in the comments?

1. Deafness

Actively listening to what’s being said about your brand is at the core of social media.

2. Slowness

Social media is a NOW environment, not a “we’re working on the December issue in July” industry.

If it takes you too long to react, the opportunity can vanish.

3. Caution

Companies have to empower their agencies to facilitate social media conversations. Agencies have to empower their employees to handle social media on behalf of clients.

If you’re afraid, you’re not in the game.

4. Phoniness

Social media users – especially social network members – are cagey. They can smell b.s. three clicks away.

Resist the temptation to create your own reviews and other falsehoods. It doesn’t work.

5. Greed

The whole point of social media is for people to let other people know what’s good and righteous.

If you refuse to link to other sites or don’t create and distribute good content, etc. you are not being a good social media citizen – and it will get noticed.

6. Inflexibility

Think of social media as its own world with its own rules.

Don’t try to “social media-ize” your existing marketing and message. It doesn’t work.

7. Seriousness

Much of the social media’s appeal is based on humor and satire.

If you or your company can’t handle getting made fun of on occasion, you may want to rethink your social media plans.

Download the sins as a PDF>>

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mikepk
@Jez that's particularly interesting because my take on conversational marketing (or social media marketing) is that, to be effective, you have to be honest and engage as yourself (and not endlessly repeat a marketing message). I think ideally, if you provide real value and insight (the hard part), then people will want to engage with you, as well as respect more what/who you represent. It's a fine/fuzzy line which is what makes this whole approach to marketing tough to do.

Jez Farmer
...And if you're in the UK then point 4 is pretty important. We have some new legislation that appeared in May which prohibits marketers from impersonating someone, or even just omitting to tell them that they are marketing (ie appearing to be just another punter in the chat room). It has criminal sanctions too! This also applies to bloggers on magazines who are simply the face of an advertorial.

mikepk
Nice list; short, clear, and concise but gets to the heart of the social media marketing philosophy. I think "greed" may be the most important of these, if you're not giving back to the medium, the medium will ignore you.

@Eric, I think passion can grow if you have a systematic approach to it, and especially if you have measurement since then you can actually see small gains that may also help keep you "in the game".

Eric
I agree - I might also add: "Having too high of expectations," or whatever single word means that. Social media isn't something people start on Monday and cash a bunch of checks from on Wednesday. It not only takes patience, but actual passion. Otherwise it becomes a tedious chore. (A tedious chore without a bunch of checks on Wednesday, no less.) Someone who does it just for the promotion and without any love for it is likely to just abandon the whole thing before they even come close to seeing a benefit.

That's a stat Technorati never seems to mention, is it? They're always quick to tell you how many millions of blogs they've registered, but no one seems to count all of the blogs that get abandoned because it didn't achieve instant success.