October 28th, 2009

Social Media Mistakes 2: Cash for Comment

money

Are you thinking of starting some sort of Social Media project for your company? A blog perhaps? It is increasingly common for companies to pay people to post comments and other content on their company blogs, and of course, having a lot of traffic helps. However, if you are considering starting to pay for posts, think about this:

  • Is your product so bad that you need to pay someone to speak positively about it? If it isn’t, why can’t you get people to talk about it anyway? Have you looked into your targeting? Are there other marketing-measures that need to be considered?
  • In the likely event of someone finding out that you are paying people to write positive words of your product, will the resulting bad reputation hurt your company more than it would benefit from the pay-posts?

Most of the time, perhaps all of the time, the driving force behind a company who starts some sort of Social Media campaign is to create more sales. If you are not honest about your product or service, your clients will inevitably find out. Consider that it’s just like in a relationship between two people, the basis of understanding, commitment and connection comes from the honesty of the relation.

It is the ‘Social’ in Social Media that one must put extra attention to. If you are not behaving socially with your clients, if you try to bring them behind the light, they will not speak favourably of you when they find out. The truth is, if you can’t be social in Social Media, then you won’t have the results you want.

Image by bradipo

Social Media