Your company may not need a Twitter account, a blog, or a viral video campaign: but ignoring social media completely can leave you exposed.

Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew and father of the modern day public relations industry, once said that 'the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.'

Bernays was speaking of a simpler time, a time when the blueprint for a mass propaganda apparatus, devised and refined during wartime, was being superimposed upon the interests of a peacetime civilisation. It would take root as the PR and advertising industries we know today.

Over the last weeks, newspaper editors have pushed a news agenda which links the individual’s access to social media with an egalitarian society. CNN’s Elise Labott, for example, acclaims social media for providing citizens with a channel for disclosure in the face of state oppression:

...social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, are providing the United States with critical information in the face of a crackdown on journalists by Iranian authorities.

However, these same channels are used by companies to influence the interests and set the agenda of internet users.

Engage or exploit?

So, how are the ‘masses’ of people who use social networks (those engaged, idealists may claim, in creating a truly democratic new territory) influenced by the ‘intelligent manipulation’ of Bernays’ spawn?

On one side, there are those companies who have limited their use of social media to quite a straight down the line approach. They have an official Twitter account, an official blog maybe, and their editors may respond to forum posts under their real names, disclosing their association with their brand.

On the darker, flip side of this coin, there is the strategy of anonymous interaction (sometimes called astroturfing), where an associate of a company will not disclose that association to the community, in order to covertly build brand recognition, or to divert users toward new hubs. Supplying editorial to well regarded bloggers, creating influential and anonymous Twitter accounts, forum networking and so on – these are all obvious and frequently used means of manipulating the mini-democracies which have developed around web 2.0 platforms.

Recently, a plastic surgery company in the states got fined $300,000 for 'flooding the internet with false positive reviews' - a case which highlights the dubious moral and legal position which this type of marketing can put companies in.

Get with it.

There's a video on youtube (search 'social media is the new punk rock'), produced by Engage ORM which forces a comparison between the punk rock movement and the rise of social media.

The company, who work in online reputation management, claim that social media is now ‘bigger, more pervasive, more powerful [and] more mainstream’ than the initial wave of punk rock was. The company (rather unsurprisingly, considering their product) claim that it is vital for those corporations who profited off repackaging punk aesthetics without ever ‘getting punk’ to be attuned and responsive to the user generated content which makes up social media networks. .  
 
Anyone who uses the web regularly will have seen parties crashed by the plodding, half-witted entrance of someone with an agenda to push or a product to sell. I guess Engage ORM’s video, which is, on the whole, a fairly embarrassing attempt to replicate ‘all that viral stuff’, does accurately convey some of what is often missed by companies and corporations when they flop like this – namely, that whilst everyone in the boardroom knows the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘Wordpress’, they don’t really ‘get’ how they are used.

When it all goes wrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Playing out at the moment is the case of singer songwriter Dave Carroll. Poor Dave had $1,200 worth of damage levelled out onto his guitar by the staff at United Airlines. He pestered for the money, but was fobbed off and ignored. A year later, Dave wrote a song entitled ‘United Breaks Guitars’, a jaunty tune outlining the failings of the company, which has so far been viewed 2,933,140 times on Youtube alone, where it gets responses of support every couple of minutes, and has started a set of boycotts of the airline. If that wasn’t bad enough, the man has plans to release two more songs detailing his love for the company in the near future.
 
So what has United’s response been? A conference call to Dave. A refund (of course). And the ‘hip’ assertion from their PR people that they ‘loved’ the song.Here would have been the perfect opportunity for a company to engage with social media users on their own terms. They did not do this.
 
Atlantic’s troubles arose from a video, posted on Youtube which went viral, so why was nobody there quick enough off the mark to react with their own offering?

Anything but this half hearted response. Why not give the baggage handlers responsible some guitar lessons with the band, film the results and post the video back onto Youtube? Or perhaps have the song play in their headphones, on repeat, for entire shifts, and then get them to tweet about their slow descent into madness?

Their failure to deal with this crises shows the danger of being unaware of what we believe to be the most valuable asset of seeing social media networks for brands, not as channels for direct marketing as such, but as areas where businesses can show consideration toward, and interact with, their most important asset - their customers.

If United was my company I would be asking the PR department some big questions, namely 'Why exactly am I paying you?'.