Importance of honesty in social media
Building a brand is difficult at the best of times and in 2010 where many businesses are going to focus time and energy on building their brand with social Media. There has never been a better time to focus on building a brand now with the existence of easy to use tools like Twitter and facebook being honest and clear to your audience is extremely important.
If you offer a service or product don’t hard sell people will not follow you to hear you rant about how great your product is all day that said if your product/service is something they may be looking for then at that point in time by all means suggest it.
Be honest and true to your audience because if you don’t you will not only hurt your brand but you could damage others. If you have competitors don’t bash them with comments or tweets, don’t actively promote the fact that the competition have not got the reach you do and so belittle them it’s just not professional.
Something that has annoyed me slightly recently is an action @bradburton has just started which is a hashtag of #RTbomb whereby in his own words “Doing really offensive tweets and then put and RT @ofsomeudon‘t like b4 #RTBomb” something that I personally think is very unprofessional – the idea of a RT (rewteet) is sending a message someone posted on their Twitter stream and displaying it to your followers. Now if you are (even jokingly) editing and posting an offensive tweet by pretending its from the original person then this is hurting brands the examples Brad did were not particularly harmful but misleading non the less and could damage brands.
RT @dannyrowe Apple Taxi’s of WSM announce FREE piece of fruit with every trip. To help with the 5 aday. #RTBomb
RT @noredbraces Can you help? I’m actively looking for a #socialmedia expert to help my business #RTBomb
@lanternphoto: RT @BradBurton just joined BNI, looking forward to my first meeting Tuesday. #RTBomb
RT @Tesco due to lower footfall due to weather we are discounting 25% off all items on purchases over £30 plz RT #RTBomb
You can see some of the #rtbomb / #rtbombing going on here
Im all for fun and joking on twitter but retweeting users with these changes could well be damaging and hope that professionals do not attempt to take on this unprofessional hashtag.
