Living and working in the community

Posted by Chris

January 18, 2008

One of the bits of advice I’ve frequently dropped to studios looking to cut costs and increase their social media presence was to hire someone to establish relationships with bloggers full time. This sort of blog-relations expert can act as a point of contact for those who are out there writing about movies on their own independent sites.

Now, as I conceded, hiring a full-time person with all the stuff that entails may not sound at first like a cost-saving exercise. But it is.

When a company wants to expand into a new country the best thing they can do is hire someone local, someone who knows the language and is familiar with the local customs and culture. Why? Because it’s so much easier to do that than it is to send someone who’s never spoken the language, once read an encyclopedia entry on the country but otherwise is not familiar with the country.

The same goes for the blog community. It is invaluable to have someone who speaks the language if you, as a studio or any other corporation or entity, are planning to enter that world.

Consider the following scenario. Your company has decided that, because your CMO has heard the word a lot, you need a “widget.” So you contract a tech vendor, who creates one that meets the brand needs, and you have your PR agency let a bunch of the top Technorati ranked blogs know about it based on a list you built from a media directory firm.

(Inside note: I may have just killed several of my online colleagues with the, like, five social media mistakes I listed in that previous paragraph. Let’s move on in their memory.)

Something goes wrong with the widget, though. It doesn’t work on Typepad-powered blogs. The bloggers notice this immediately and look for someone to complain to. But the email address the widget came from doesn’t accept replies and they don’t know anyone at the company in question. So they, with no other recourse available to them, begin to publicly blast the company who commissioned the widget to their sizable audiences. Remember, these are high-profile/high-traffic sites.

Now it’s a crisis. Only you don’t know about it for three days because no one is reading those blogs except your intern’s sister, who eventually brings it to his attention where it begins to work its way up the organizational chart.

Now consider having someone well-versed in social media in-house. They would be there to:

1) Make sure it worked to begin with

2) Monitor for problems

3) Serve as a point of contact for those people having problems

Doesn’t that make a whole lot more sense?

Social media contributors have no problem venting about the problems they’re having with a company or product. It can help tremendously to have someone in-country who’s familiar with the players, the language and the lifestyle who can navigate the waters, avoid pitfalls and deal with those pitfalls that can’t be avoided.