Social Media Me?

There is a question I love to ask as well as answer. Professionally and otherwise. “When you want people to talk about your product/service/message, will you make a platform of your own or you’ll try to leverage the existing platforms?”

Well, my answer is quite simple. If you have a really big idea, and you feel yourself/your company committed to that idea, it makes sense to build your own platform for it. If not, or you are planning to do a quick activity, it’s always better to stick to the existing channels.

When you look at it again, it’s not all that simple. When you try to push your message through an established channel, there’s a higher chance that you’ll loose a customer to something else. And they might not come back to you.

LG’s new “give it a ponder” campaign does a workaround for this problem. It’s quite interesting. Please go and see it here: http://www.giveitaponder.com/

Here are some videos from the campaign:

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Tell me which one is your favorite!

Should corporates control social networking?

It’s quite obvious that most of the companies would like to reap rewards from the social media revolution. But at the same time, they are quite skeptical about the social media conversations going out of their control.
The latest news is ESPN Digital Media publishing their guidelines on social networking. It has already became a hot discussion topic in twitter. You can follow the news on Mashable.
My take on this subject is this: I don’t think corporate should control social media. But they can take part on these conversations and positively influence them. But that can’t happen overnight. You need to make your company  web 2.0 ready first.
I feel that ESPN is quite sincere about engaging social media. But they should have found another way to communicate their social media plans to the staff.

Watch your customer blogs!

What is it like buying a gift card for the face-value and had to pay extra for the handling? Check this blog post on Church of the Customer Blog.

Handling fee, or manhandled?

The interesting part is, the business owner herself has posted a comment clarifying the issues.

Are you still going to ignore the power of social media?