The Best Way To Fail At Social Media

Recently, a friend of mine approached me with some questions regarding the social media strategy that his company was planning on implementing. The company is in the business of building software for Oil companies, and while I won't mention the name of the company out of politeness, I will tell you this; they had a lot to learn about Social Media.

Their plan was to begin a company blog to engage their clients, and add value to their website. Which is actually a pretty good start; a blog works very well for both of those things. However, the company was very, very paranoid that their competition would begin to steal ideas from them through whatever information was transmitted through the blog and decided that every article had to be approved by the president of the company before it could get posted. The other caveat was that the blog articles couldnt talk about any of the company's products or services, again because they were afraid that their competition would steal their ideas. But, hey, at least they had a blog. Thats a start.

Unfortunately, the blog was doomed to failure. While they did want to begin blogging, and had plans to build a complimentary presence on Twitter, the blog articles would only be accessible to readers who were already clients of the company. Which begs the question, 'what are you going to tweet about?. Because every reader of the blog has to become a client first in order to view the articles, what would be the point of alerting the Twittersphere about new blog posts, or bringing people back to the blog to start a discussion, if only the people youve already sold to can access it? How are you going to entice prospectiv clients into a discussion of your services if you can't talk about your products? Finally, if its a private blog, why are you so worried about the competition getting access to it?

In essence, this company is hopping on the Social Media bandwagon without thinking it through. Perhaps they do have a legitimate security concern, but if that's the case then a medium that's all about the sharing of information and ideas probably isn't the right fit for them. I've been blogging for this little boutique hotel here in Calgary for a little more than a year, and if I had to articulate the single biggest lesson I've learned while doing it, it would this; "the more you share, the more you get back". Where companies like this fail at Social Media is jumping in head first without taking the time to develop a strategy that complements their business. Without taking a candid look at your business, and formulating a Social Media plan that works for it, it'll be like trying to teach cats to scuba dive by providing written instructions. An exercise in futility.