It seems the key to Social media is creating a strategy, and then making a company-wide decision to manage and stick to the strategy for the long haul. As was said in the lecture, once a company makes the decision to enter into a form of social media, they must stick with it. It could be disastrous if you were to create buzz about your brand online, then drop the updates altogether.
Once a company has made the commitment and entered into a form of social media the strategy comes into play. Like we read in Scott’s book the purpose of social media from a brand perspective is not to market to consumers, but instead to create a relationship. The key to an effective strategy then for a brand into enter into a conversation with their target demographic and manage the message to keep it succinct across all forms of social media and media.
In my experience the biggest hurdle was to maintain internal interest in social media. About a year ago, Fandotech put together our blog, joined Twitter, Facebook and placed multiple videos on YouTube. All steps in the right direction. However, the plan was to post content on the blog written by internal technical staff, and then the marketing department would continue to update Facebook and Twitter. Within six months, interest waned and management was scrambling to get a weekly blog post; over time staff changes resulted in fewer Tweets and Facebook updates.
