The Bastardization of Social Media

This has been an absolutely incredible year. We’ve been privileged to talk to some household-name companies about PR & Social Media. We’ve even won more than our fair share of FORTUNE-level engagements. (w00t!)

But, as the brand names got bigger, I sometimes caught a whiff of something unsavory in those oaken conference rooms.

I was beginning to smell a rat.

In some select cases we found our prospective clients more interested in paying lip-service to Social Media ideals than in true change. They were looking to mark off the check-box, as in, “Social Media? Yep, we got that.”

Merriam-Webster defines “bastardization” as “(reducing) from a higher to a lower state or condition.” Here’s an example…

One company we talked to had already added basic Social Media elements to their web properties. Permalinks, embed code, even some blogs and remixable multimedia content. At first glance, most any social media schmoe would laud the company’s savvy.

But when we dug deeper, we only saw problems:

• The blogs only spoke to tiny special-interest niches of the brand’s humongous audience…
• Many of the company’s previous forays into Social Media had been both disjointed and blithely abandoned (and yet were still easy to find)…
• The company’s name was being abused by SEO scammers…
• Some of their best stuff was simply hard to find…

Ultimately the company seemed more than happy to allow people to share their content, but was unwilling to do anything to engage with them 1:1.

They didn’t want to be part of the conversation; they wanted to be the topic of the conversation.

We pointed out the difference. We lost. (w00t!)

Continue reading here: Social Media Agency vs. PR Agency

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