Likeminds – can we make corporate bloggers sincere?
Friday, February 26, 2010 by Stewart Baines
Tonight – my first experience of #Likeminds – and I’ve got more questions than answers. I came to this social media event, which was highly recommended as one of the best on the social media calendar, hoping to learn about the positive impact social media has had on companies. I find that the problem with events like this is that a load of consultants and small agencies are essentially pitching to each other, and there are very few leads. Scattered around though, are some very bright, very persuasive people who have far more experience than I do in engaging enterprise acolytes.
Nonetheless, I did learn something tonight – you can’t fake sincerity. If you want brands – whether B2B or B2C – to engage with social media, particularly blogging and Twitter, you need to find interesting, enthusiastic contributors that enjoy what they are doing. You can cajole, poke, threaten or bribe consultants and other knowledge workers in enterprises to participate in knowledge sharing, you can persuade them of the need to build their own social capital, but you can’t convince them to be sincere. So what does it take to convince people to be sincere? Tomorrow I hope to learn that . In the meantime, how do you think we can encourage corporate bloggers to be sincere?
#stewartbaines
Jonny 'insomnia' rocket says on February 26th, 2010 at 2:18 am :
Sincere people can be sincere. Sincerity isn’t necessarily a fixed quality, either. On the streets of Baltimore (well, in the Wire) they’ll say “do you feel me’. So sincerity can be assumed, but it must be meant. it’s an energy transmission, akin to a game we used to play when I were an actor, in which two people would stand opposite each other and attempt to have a complex conversation using only eye contact, tone of voice and one word. It’s a magic sauce, hard to emulate, yet everybody has it from time-to-time. Ultimately it surely is about tying brands up to conversations which actually do intrinsically matter. So in terms of social networking and brand appeal, is the unspoken question really “HOw do we make social networking posts which seem sincere, but actually push our insincere agenda?” What if you just can’t any more?What if the brands need to change to meet the new tide?
Course, that could be idealism.
Anyway, I got to go now, to coin a favorite quote, it is late and I’m at the end of my personality
Gnight