Displaying items by tag: engagement

Almost exactly two years ago, dp dialogue posted a punishing article, raking Optus over the coals for their total lack of social media presence during an unfolding outage that affected thousands.

Since that time Optus, and many other major companies along with them, have completely overhauled their communication strategies.

Social media has become such a prominent method for consumers to discuss brands that it is now the case that you cannot afford to be without a strategy for monitoring and responding to your fans and detractors online.

How did Optus change to reflect the need to address customer service socially?

If there is one hard and fast rule for social media engagement, it's this:

Be Genuine.

Social media is not your Grandfather's marketing medium. It's not Mad Men. Social media is the over-the-fence conversation, the pub chat, the coffee & cake catch-up.

Real people hate being marketed at. None of us likes TV advertising, we suffer through it to get free content. We don't look at display ads on websites (it's called 'banner blindness') but we put up with the tokyo-city blinkfest to view the sites we like.

Sure, Facebook runs some paid advertising along the side. It's not intrusive, usually contextual and easily ignored. Some apps do push themselves into my newsfeed, but it's easy enough to block that app. Twitter is, for the most part, advertising free.

Today I witnessed a massive two-fer of social media ineptitude, all in the name of trying to turn users into paid advertisers.