I'm lucky to have a Manager that is keen on Social Media, and allows me some leeway in discovering and investigating the whole Social Media construct.
The corporate 'We' - have a Twitter Account, a Face-Book presence and a Blog Page at Square-Space, and a LinkedIn group.
What I'm coming to realise is, is that this stuff is ok, but it really is useful if you are in a business or service that is frequented by the end-user type. That is to say it's not useful for a distributor company, such as the one I work for, that is in essence representing brands that already have their own Social Media presence.
For example? Air NZ and the Air Points Fairy is held to be one of the big NZ success stories. How would this go, or would be as successful if it was a service being offered by say Flight Shop (just to name a name).
Telecom and Vodafone and Microsoft have a twitter presence in NZ too.
I've yet to see a success story, or a way to be successful story, for a company such as the one I work for.
Sure we can become a twitter presence and present information as it comes to hand to the market- but garnering followers for information that may already be available from the source appears to be the the missing bit that no one can offer up a solution for.
Many twitter"experts" are quick to offer the same pithy advice on twittering, that is you have to be in to win, listen and interact. What they fail to tell you is how to connect to the audience, especially if you are not the company directly responsible for the product being commented on.
Sure twitter is good and closing down or interacting with complaints/complainers, but given that we have interactive (real people) contact with those likely to complain then our twitter presence appears to be just lip service, for us anyway.
Recently out Australian parent company ran a daily twitter based comp, that frankly had #fail all over it. Basically because the "build it and they will come" ethos does not apply, or did not materialise.
Very generalised I know, I bet dollars to cents that there are niche distributor type business to business companies that are successful - these I would pick though are seen as brands in their own right, and not being representatives for the goods or service they offer.
What I am saying is that Business-to-Business type Social Media is a different game to the Business-to-End User customer one. And I can't find a play book for the B2B model.
A life just as ordinary. Wherein I drink beer, and write badly
