Authentic, Genuine Engagement Critical - Even for the Experts
Over the weekend, I was excited to see an opportunity to network with a well-respected social technology consulting company. This company was holding a recruiting event a few hours drive from home so I decided to attend. I did not go looking for a job but rather to meet some of the staffers from this firm who are recognized thought leaders in collaborative communications technology. I have been following some of these folks through their writing for years.
Notice of the event was posted on a friend’s (who is an employee of this company) facebook page. According to the notice, there were three things that I (and others) had to do in order to get on the list to attend the event:
1. Retweet a scripted post about the event
2. Follow the company on Twitter
3. “Like” the brand on facebook
No problem. Easy to do. Not soon after I completed these tasks, I received a Twitter @reply informing me that I was “on the list”.
To my great surprise, when I arrived at the venue, there was no list. Anyone could have walked in off the street. One key to social media success is authentic, non-cynical communication. This was not the case here. They succeed in creating some degree of exclusivity by requiring specified activity in order to attend. The result was the firm got many retweets and an increase in “followers” and “likes”. However, dong these things did not entitle us to anything that anyone else could have received just by stopping by. I felt used.
I ran into a similar occurrence with a food client. They posted a video about how their food was prepared to their facebook page and stated the first five people that post something they learned from the video would win a prize. A bunch of people responded and as promised the first five won a prize. The problem was that some of the first five responses had nothing to do with the video segment. Naturally other folks whose posts did relate to the video segment were upset that they played by the rules and lost out to those who did not. Unfortunately, the client didn’t really care. They just wanted a bunch of posts and ignored the rules that they created. Even when we pointed out that these disgruntled comments we appearing on their facebook wall, the client wasn’t particularly concerned. The question naturally, is how likely are those customers or prospects going to be to engage again on a similar promotion? Answer: not very likely.
Back to the event. The next problem was there was no organization to the meeting at all. The event was held at a bar and when I entered, there as no greeter from the company or sign-in table. Across the room at an unmanned booth were a pack of name tags and a few pens. As the evening wore on there were no words of welcome to the group, no introductions or identification of any employee or representative of the company and no indication of what anyone was supposed to do. If this was simply a happy hour, OK but his was positioned as a recruiting event and there was considerable confusion among attendees as to what was supposed to happen. Additionally, there were no comments at the end of the event as to what was going to happen next, apparently nothing.
Finally, one of the primary reasons I attended was to meet an executive at the firm that I have been following for a number of years through his blog, Tweets and whitepapers. I actually spoke with him several times on the phone and tried to bring him in on a large client project. So, even though we had not met face to face, we did have some level of interaction previous to the event. I found him by the bar and lingered on the outside of an informal conversation he was having with a couple of other people. When there was a break I introduced myself and told him how happy I was to finally meet him. He looked at me in shock as if I had just interrupted his most personal, private conversation. He asked me one throwaway question about my drive down, said, “excuse me” and returned to his conversation. I felt like Jack Black in Nacho Libre when he meets his idol Ramses only to have Ramses treat him with indignant disdain.
When I spoke with my friend who worked at this company, he told me there were only 14 employees and they were working on developing their culture. The irony is that they are a leader in selling the benefits of collaborative communication technology. However, you can buy all the technology you want, but if the culture is not open and does not support engagement and authentic communication among its employees, customers and constituents then every penny of collaborative technology investment will be wasted. While I still have a great deal of respect for this organization, their luster for me has somewhat dimmed.
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