A fascinating discussion is happening over on Mark Schaefer’s BusinessesGrow blog, asking ‘What risk is there if the person who blogs or twitters for you becomes bigger than the brand?’
Put another way, if the social media celebrity who is your brand’s spokesperson leaves the company (or moves out of that role) is the company at risk?
There are a whole lot of very fine minds discussing this, looking at issues such as:
- who created the twitter profile, the person or the company?
- does the company ‘own’ the tweets that the star writes?
- what happens when your ‘star’ is poached by a competitor and becomes their ‘star’?
- do you have honesty and transparency across your channels, therefore ‘widgetWendy’ is actually run by a Wendy?
- or do you have several anonymous, behind-the-scenes folks run the ‘widgetWendy’ ‘name’?
- how can an ‘anonymous’ person run a vidblog, or should Darren replace Darren? (see the Mark’s post for the context behind this seemingly bizarre question)
These questions and a whole lot more…
What is marvellous is how posts like these can show that the ‘stars’ are listening.
For example, the twitterer who runs the profile @SharpieSusan is actually a ‘Susan’ – the brand manager for Sharpie pens. She has a stack (sorry for the pun) of followers on twitter and she points them via her profile off to the Sharpie 1.0 and 2.0 sites.
Her name was mentioned during the discussion as one of the ‘stars’ – lo and behold not only does Susan join in the conversation, but so too does her manager and social media luminary Bert DuMars, the VP of E-Business & Interactive Marketing at Newell Rubbermaid.
This shows the power of ‘paying attention’ – brands and their managers can add to conversations and interact with the participants, becoming more ‘real’ and ‘top of mind’ at the same time.
And what about the questions above?
Go read Mark’s post for the answers
