Does your company really want to hang out with me?

IIRC, there was this female (Magda..?) in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition who was employed by an advertising company to do just this for their clients - social/viral marketing at its most grassroots. She'd hang out at bars, clubs and other 'hip' spots, chat up people and subtly hawk the company's wares.

The upshot was that she did this for so long, that she became quite unable to have a normal conversation with people at such places - owing to the lingering suspicion that there might be other such advertising 'plants' like her.

Good read, somewhat unnerving, slightly meh ending..

From the article: "This is what's happening with most companies' “Social Media Strategy”."

Ouch.

But it is totally true. To my way of thinking a company shouldn't have a Twitter account if it is going to be all business promotion. You have to mix in something interesting to keep subscribers happy.

The same thing goes for business blogging, etc.

Companies are not real people. They are literally fake.

"Social media strategy" says it all, really. You use a strategy to exploit something.

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to fully put yourself out there in a way that scales. You could see huge and immediate benefits by running muckwork as 'the derek sivers show,' but sooner or later you're going to run into situations where there are people you don't actually want to be talking to right now and you just wish you could put on the face of 'derek sivers the businessman' to avoid the obligation.

I think that last word is really the key thing, because social media can be insanely powerful in only a few weeks or months, but it comes with all these longterm obligations that can quickly get to be completely overwhelming.

Quite true, but terrible analogy. You want to make a point about the bank, great, but the bank's teller whom you have a crush on is a poor analogy for the bank's social web engagement.

It is hard to balance relationship building with marketing (just as it is hard to draw the line between writing great code and shipping product). That's why some of us get paid to do it.

Companies also have the ability to identify potential customers by researching what someone says on a social network. If a Zappos employee read someone's tweet about having sore feet and was able to recommend a pair of shoes that you would be interested in buying, would that be as big of turn off to you as well?

Drawing an analogy between marketing and dating reminds me of an old joke: http://www.themoneyac.com/time-for-a-joke-marketing-explaine...