Social marketing considerations

Perhaps one of the most interesting and terrifying aspects of the web is social marketing.  As a company, we’ve dabbled in it including having a Facebook page and Twitter account.  Obviously, the blog is here as well and we’ve been commenting and submitting to BoardGameGeek and other forums as we go along.  And along the way, three aspects jumped out at us:

 - Time cost

Creating blog posts, updating the Facebook page and Twitter, reviewing forums and replying, all of it eats up a lot of time.   We’ve not even dabbled in video posts or podcasts at all, mostly because the amount of time it would take to do so on an on-going basis is way too high.  As it stands, we do our best, but sometimes, the blog doesn’t get replied to nor forums visited because we’re busy with all the other aspects of running a business.

 - The line between personal and professional

Especially with the new social media applications (Facebook and Twitter), its really easy for the line between personal and professional to blur.  While we would like to be transparent,  there are opinions and issues that; while they affect the business, might not be suitable for personal consumption.  An example would be the problems we had during 2008 that we never really detailed.  Most of them were personal, but it would help explain things to customers more - how far and where do we draw the line?

There are numerous, more directly related frustrations that occur for us as a business.  Discussing them in detail, on one hand, gives our customers an interesting view of our business.  On the other, it can be viewed as direct attacks on other competitors, organisations and individuals (beliefs  and otherwise).

Where is the line?  Mostly, we’ve been erring on the side of caution.

- Invasiveness

This relates to the above point, both for our own lives (how much do we want to link our personal blogs / profiles / etc to the company?) and for customers.  We get good reviews, we get bad reviews on other sites like BGG.  Sometimes, the reviews are very fair (yes, we did screw up that order); other times, the reviews are 90% correct but that 10% loss shines a bad light on us.  Well, when do we step in? Do customers who post these threads have a right to some privacy from us interjecting?  Would it be better to leave those 90% correct posts up as is - after all, to really ‘correct’ a post, we would have to C&P private e-mail exchanges.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the line for social media is rather interesting.  We’ve decided, for the most part, to try to keep things as professional in these communication avenues.  Sometimes that means leaving the egg on our face, sometimes it means not explaining things as much as we’d like if we were discussing it with a customer in-person.  The fact is, anything written / posted / mailed online is subject to replication to infinity, so if we’re even slightly unsure, its probably best to not say anything.

 A good example of when I think I crossed that line was my rather irate post about the  scam.  And as ubrarose pointed out, I should let it go.