Social Media: Perfect or Poison?

Social Media seems to be a controversial topic today. Some people see the good in it and how it has to potential to revolutionize communication and networking. Others see social media as being sleazy with your resources and that it is not a professional way to network. In David Meerman Scott's book, "Real-Time Marketing & PR", chapter 13 covers the topic of companies social media policies. In the forum this week, I posted two companies social media policies; Adidas' and the Los Angeles Times. Those two companies are pretty successful and have been towards the top of the food chain in their respective fields. One reason could be they have adapted to the world we live in and have advanced their marketing, public relations, and publicity. The book states,"engage your marketplace right now, free your people to communicate in real-time." This made me think of the "United Breaks Guitars" incident and how they're social media policy came into play with the YouTube storm swirling around them. The social media policy in play was obviously not a strong or sensible policy because United did not react in real-time. In that situation, social media and a real-time reaction would have been so greta for United. I feel as though social media gives us an opportunity as an organization or company to try and level with our audience. When people see a large corporation or someone with a large platform make an effort to connect with them, it has more magnitude than just 140 characters. It creates a good image, it builds trust and allows the audience to have a closer connection with the said organization or company. I do admit social media can be abused, but that is why the policies are made. To prevent people from abusing it or using it inappropriately. I personally believe social media will do nothing but improve the nature of business, PR, and almost any aspect of the business professional world.

Real-Time for Real Businesses

In todays business world, the time to react is key. Knowing how much time you have to complete a certain task is vital to not only yourself and your business, but your associates as well. In this weeks reading of David Meerman Scott's, Real-Time Marketing, I was introduced to the idea of "Real-time" strategy used in businesses. First off, I learned that a standard time for a response for a journalist or someone in public relations is 72 hours. Being a journalist, this is important and pertinent to my major and career after school. In Scott's book, he notes in the world of business, you are rewarded for speed. Especially in any field with the media, speed is vital. Speed is not just what we think it is. There are laws for speed and in real-time, those laws can make or break your career and job. There are laws on how to disseminate the news and how to spread the word through different news outlets. Now these laws are not legislative laws, they are more advised principles to follow to better yourself and your business. At the same time, Real-Time thinking is not an "either/or" thing, it is a mindset that we must have as entrepreneurs, co-workers, and professionals. In our world of news, we need to use real-time methods and use speed in our work, because you’ve got to react quickly to the news. If not first, then early, because you can’t react late.

That freaking song that got stuck in my head

In the reading for this weeks class, David Meerman Scott certainly made the first two chapters pretty easy to read. It was so easy to follow the story of Dave Carroll and his broken Taylor guitar. In fact, it was so easy that I still cannot get that stupid song out of my head. The books talks about how Dave Carroll  made an unremarkable public relations exhibit and he probably didn't even try. He was just making a statement about his discontent with United Airlines. The way that his song blatantly calls out United, one would figure that United would have responded with a little more urgency. Instead they leave Dave with no answers for nine months.

A question to raise to the reader: If you were Dave, would you have redacted differently? I can personally say that I would have done the same. I think that his creativity is probably much greater than mine, but I would've tried to use my platform as a singer and musician to make my message known to the public. Especially since United Airlines is a very popular airline and is a company that is used everyday around the globe, he had some serious guts to pull that off.