Careful you know the rules when using social media

As social media starts to grow up a little from crawling baby to tottering toddler some interesting research results are starting to be published. What is social media being used for at this stage of its development?

These results of a survey, thanks to Dave Fleet for the introduction, conducted in Canada show some trends to take note of. Users of social media tend to use their media of choice at least once a day. 31% agree that social media is more credible than advertising.

Some 61% of users are using social media to research products to purchase. And this is the killer for me 36% depend on social media to help them with purchase decisions. WOW.

Does that put new meaning to the concept of word of mouth, or what?

So here’s an example of how not to do it, in my opinion. I wrote two articles on the Berlin Philharmonic new Digital Concert Hall. The first one described how I got to sign up and how that experience of navigating their site was. Not that good.

The second article was a glowing report on my experience of participating in a ‘live’ video feed concert on the evening of the concert. I loved it, it was fabulous. Of course what helped was the fact that the Mac had been plugged into a data projector and extra speakers attached. A true concert.

I received a comment on the ‘glowing’ article by a probable PR lady from the Berlin Philharmonic, a lady by the name of Patricia. She said she was thrilled that I loved the concert and liked to let me know that the Berlin Phil was also now available on YouTube.

Now why would I be annoyed at this comment? In my first article on the Berlin Philharmonic I wrote extensively on how bad the translation on the site was and how difficult the lovely design was to read.

A black site with small white font is terrible to read for anybody with slighter weaker eyes. It’s known amongst accessibility experts that this is a no-no. I know this because my daughter is an accessibility expert and speaks on this topic at international conferences.

Yet dear Patricia did not comment on the first article at all, although she must have found it if she found the more recent one. She would, and definitely should, have been searching to see what was being said about the Digital Concert Hall: good or bad.

What she should have done to engage in a serious conversation with me was to a) advise that they had gotten somebody in to check the English translations (which they haven’t actually) and b) that at this stage they had no plans to change the design of the site, but thanked me ever so much for bringing it to their attention.

With other words acknowledge. You don’t necessarily have to do anything about it. I’m certainly not going to bother to check up on their site whether they have improved the translation. And I understand that the design of the site would have cost a fortune and that it would not be practical to change to a more accessible format.

As a business, if you want to work with social media, then understand how it works. It is a two way conversation. You do not just sell to your customers. You respond honestly to what they are saying. Acknowledge if you can’t do anything about the concerns, but at least advise the customer you have heard them.

With her comments on my blog I just think the Berlin Philharmonic is commenting to sell me more concerts. Not good enough. And guess what, it’s going out onto my blog with a fair number of readers. And a quick Twitter tweet.

What was that statistic again? 36% depend on social media to help them with purchase decisions. Be careful how you use social media. Understand how it works. Leave it alone if you don’t want to engage wholeheartedly.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh here?

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