Five Social Media Scenarios

The increase in traffic coming to b-to-b sites from Twitter, LinkedIn, and elsewhere in some cases needs to cause some rethinking of your publishing strategies. It’s playing out differently at different media companies, and so the answers will be different from publication to publication. For now, though, I’ll throw out some scenarios; answering them may help you in your decision-making.

Scenario 1: You get word of a breaking news story affecting the industry you cover. You can tweet about it almost immediately, or have someone write a story for one of your websites about it in, say, an hour. Do you start tweeting, even knowing that your competitors then have the story and may beat you to the punch by putting something on their site? Or do you consider the fact your staff tweeted first to be a “victory” and a “scoop”?

Scenario 2: A feature story one of your writers published to one of your websites drew two comments. On LinkedIn, there’s a discussion about it with 23 comments. Do your staff participate in the LinkedIn discussion, and drive traffic to it, or try to blossom the discussion on your site?

Scenario 3: One of your writers has a Twitter account where she posts comments about the industry, links to your site, and so on. One day she Tweets something that’s not obscene, or offensive, but highly personal, highly opinionated, in your mind somewhat extreme, and you feel inappropriate. Do you say something to her, and if so, what do you say? Is her Twitter account for business, personal, both, or somewhere in between?

Scenario 4: Some of your employees befriend you on Facebook. You find out that one is pregnant, which you realize could have a significant effect on your 2012 plans. You proceed with business more or less as usual, but do you wish you hadn’t accepted the friend invitation?

Scenario 5: You have an employee who, five years ago, you would’ve hated to have quit and walk away with her contacts and knowledge and so on. Now, with social media, you see she has 4,452 Twitter followers, more than 400 LinkedIn contacts, Facebook friends, and so on, making her not just an editorial asset but also a marketing asset. Has her value to the company and the risk of her leaving now increased enormously, and what can you do about it?

Though I've probably given you plenty to think about and talk about internally, I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have.

Posted by Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Comments

[Nick Stamoulis]

Social media has certainly changed the way we do business. It's changed how we interact with our customers, but also how we interact with our own employees. What's most important to remember, is that anything shared in social media is public knowledge.

[Social Media]

Tough situations. When social media enters the picture we all deal with these situations. We deal with each on a case by case basis the best we can with the knowledge that we have at the time.