The Right Way to Use Social Media

Source: RainToday

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Charles H. Green.

Social media are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they foster depersonalized, surface interactions that can erode trust. Yet the same breadth of interaction can leverage reputation gains. At the same time that social media can lower trust, the fact of that lowered trust increases the opportunity for differentiation. If you become less and less trustworthy, and I don't change at all, then I begin to look more trustworthy – at no particular cost to myself.

I'd suggest that reputation is the repeated personal experience of trust – or of its absence. We don't trust companies (with the exception of reliability or track records); we trust the people with whom we interact. Or we do not. This view of reputation suggests it is best achieved as a byproduct of trust; specifically, as a byproduct of acting in a consistently trustworthy manner. By this view, trust drives reputation – not the other way around.

Also by this view, the best way to manage reputation through social media is not by attempting to harness the “power” of social media in service to a “good” message. The method inevitably swamps the message. Trust-based reputation – the only kind with staying power – comes from a consistent customer experience (ditto for the employee experience). If that experience is to be one of trust, then the people engaged in all aspects of the company, including social media, must behave in trustworthy ways.

The power of social media, for those willing to see it, lies in making the world more personal, not less so. You do that by simply behaving personally in a trustworthy manner, online as in everywhere else. Your reputation will rise in comparison to those who don't.

For the complete article, read “How Social Media Can Help – or Hurt – Your Reputation.”

From RainToday, www.raintoday.com, October 19, 2011.