Social Media Machines

On Tuesday, Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged at ReadWriteWeb about how Comcast and other corporations track what people are saying about them online, and how they engage with their customers in the social media space. Marshall’s post communicated perfectly “why so much feels so ‘wrong’ about ’social media’ these days”, as Josh Bancroft put it in his comment.

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

For some time now, we ourselves have used fairly mundane tools like RSS aggregation and Twitter search. We try to answer people’s questions concerning AboutUs and develop a deeper sense of how people feel about the site. But Marshall’s concern seems to be the advent of sophisticated, CRM-like dashboards for keeping tabs not just on relevant blog posts and tweets, but “a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways.”

At AboutUs, we genuinely feel conflicted about the changing face of corporate interaction online. From a personal perspective, a goodly portion of AboutUs-ers get a strange feeling from knowing someone is being paid to track what we say online. When a company comments on our blog posts or replies to our tweets, we get the feeling that this new, digital incarnation of customer service is one that we didn’t necessarily ask for.

From our perspective as a startup, we empathize with any company’s desire to know what is being publicly said about them. They’ve been told by the experts (real experts, not “social media experts”) to dive in to these communities and “embrace the chaos”. In doing so, they’ve done what every person does on the Web: try to filter and organize information in a way that benefits them. But Marshall’s question remains. Is this an “authentic connection in a democratized public conversation – or is it a charade?”

Defining authenticity

The line between authenticity and a charade might be drawn by both the scale of the conversation and the attitude you bring to it.

Comcast and Dell might have a team of 40-plus people dedicated solely to monitoring online communications, while startups like us have a handful by comparison. We also approach this kind of work from a community-building viewpoint, rather than as traditional public relations or customer service. This means that we don’t just pay attention to digerati with huge followings, but reply to anyone, since as a growing enterprise it genuinely matters what everyone says. Hopefully that’s something we won’t lose sight of in the future.

In reflecting on what Marshall had to say, we’d like to take this as an opportunity to remind everyone who participates in AboutUs that we would never want to use any channel of communication in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable or devalues social spaces online. If that day should come, we hope you’ll let us know with just the kind of honesty Marshall exhibited in his post.

Tagged as: customer service, facebook, marketing, pr, Social media, twitter