As a former digital activist who spent most of his time obsessing over the right tone and content needed to engage and build advocate communities, I can only shake my head at the way corporations behave online. Nevertheless, it is my job to help corporate social media work for all involved, so here are some honest observations directed at correcting the situation.
Corporations (and all large institutional players) desperately want to stake their claims somewhere on social media because, more and more, that's where the party's at. Trouble is, they suck at being human and being human is THE core competency that social media demands of its users. The crux of the matter, I believe, is that the etiquette of social media exchanges confronts the power that big guys are used to wielding in communication spaces. As a result, we routinely witness the following varieties of antisocial behavior.
The Psychopath
What kind of individual would decide that a time of mass suffering and hardship was good timing for a joke or sales opportunity? A psychopath, right? Well, this is exactly the kind of behavior that was driving the most notable social media #fail episodes of late. To wit, Kenneth Cole poking fun and selling shoes during violent Arab Spring protests or American Apparel surfing the wave of tweets around Hurricane Sandy to offer some good deals. How do such senseless posts happen? In my opinion, they are products of a culture in which business is divorced from social realities, in which any group of people, even those united by suffering, becomes a good target market. Off work, I believe that the very same people who penned these tweets would never have considered doing the same from their personal accounts.
Missing social skill:
Human empathy. Those in charge of social should always consider that their posts and responses will be received by people with feelings (yes, I feel ridiculous writing this). The urge to bomb audiences at any time with a marketing message should always be tempered by the following questions: "What do I, as a sentient being, feel in this situation? What kind of post would I publish to mark the occasion?" Trusting one's human instincts over corporate prerogatives would work wonders here.
The Robot
If someone entered a cocktail party and began spouting one liners over and over without listening to others or answering any questions, you might well check their back to see where the batteries go. And yet, this is exactly how hundreds of corporate brand pages operate on Facebook, even today. These pages are used as bulletin boards where one-way corporate announcements are pushed out daily with either no effort made to engage with the audience or willful refusal to open any kind of dialogue. When you cut and paste a traditional broadcast operation into the social setting, you create a robot. Would you delegate a robot to represent your company at social functions?
Missing social skill:
Conversation. Social media is a two-way street. Listening to your audience and engaging with them occasionally are not just nice things to do, they are the basics of legitimacy on this medium. Neglect to converse and you will be mocked and shunned sooner or later. De-activate your online robots. Replace them with humans.
The Airhead
At the time of writing, many corporations have tackled the feat of amassing thousands, if not millions, of fans and followers on their social networks. They now face the much greater challenge of finding something to say to their audiences, day in, day out, regarding their toilet paper, antiperspirant or kitchen mop. The result? Hundreds of thousands of words of vacuous copy and anodyne feelgood photos clogging up broadband worldwide. The amount of trite fluff out there is so vast that there are now fan pages dedicated to featuring the dumbest brand material online. How can this tide of treacle be stopped? All brands, even household products, can plug into what people really want to talk about regarding the product: How to fix it if it's broken, what the company is doing to improve its social and environmental footprint and... well, if you're running out of things to say, is there really a need to maintain a 2 million person Facebook community around your product, messaged daily?