The Dilemma of (Client Side) Social Media Evangelists

February 18, 2009 | Written by Yan Shikhvarger

A recent episode involving the head of Ford’s social media efforts, the well known Scott Monty of Twitter, highlighted several key issues. To get more information on what actually happened, I would recommend reading the following Jalopnik blog post (part of Gawker Media).

One issue raised by the episode was: who is leading the conversation? Is it the social media persona or the overall corporate brand. It is true that Scott Monty is very well known in the social media circle so his personal brand has very high awareness. On the other hand, it can be argued that such a tactic does work well in social media because other users want to connect to a person (that can personify a brand) and not just a corporate logo. It makes sense for Scott Monty to have dinner with bloggers and post about that but it’s tough to understand how "Ford" can have the same experience.

The other issue is value. While Scott Monty has been praised as a model social media success, the inevitable question that comes up is how has this benefited Ford? The well known tangible benefit is that Scott has a large following on Twitter, approximately 10K followers. Yet, how many of those are current vehicle shoppers or are truly interested in Ford? A good indicator of who is on Twitter is the fact that Mashable, a blog that focuses on social media, has over 100K followers (that is out of 1M to 1.5M estimated total Twitter users). So yes, Twitter is a place for social media evangelists, communications people, and technology early adopters, but probably not people currently interested in purchasing vehicles. I am one of those people btw and currently not in the market (@shikhvarger).

Some of this criticism is a bit harsh. While not directly selling product, Scott did manage to keep informed a certain online segment about all things Ford. This segment is very active and influential online so Ford was likely to benefit by a lot of grassroots publicity from the people following Scott. It would be interesting to track if any of this publicity spilled out of the tech and social media segment and entered communities of vehicle shoppers…

So this episode did start an interesting dialogue, especially with more companies likely to hire their own "director of social media." Few tough issues to work out beforehand:

• Who will lead the conversation? Persona or the brand? Is there a way to integrate?
• Focus on the target audience and not proponents of social media
• What is the primary responsibility: corporate communications or product?
• Which are the right communities to focus on? Where are the right audiences (Is it Twitter, Facebook, niche communities, etc…)?