If companies want to build their brands through social media, they’ve got to give up the kind of control that is the holy grail of traditional corporate communications.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the PR strategy of Olympics organizers, who are caught between old and new worlds of community engagement. New media is about free participation and building a community, and VANOC’s approach offers a lesson in recognizing the fine line between sabotaging community relations with excessive control and letting the bloggers run wild.
VANOC, like many companies, has good reasons to enthusiastically embrace social media. It has goals beyond simply the bottom line, including community growth and engagement. “There are potential wins in terms of social media giving the Games a deeper and broader impact in society,” notes Darren Barefoot, author of Getting to First Base, an e-book on social-media marketing.
Social media – blogging, Facebook fan pages, web application mash-ups, Twitter campaigns and the like – don’t work if your communications model is about leading the pack. Now it’s about becoming part of the swarm. “In a swarm, one bee is leading the group, but that leadership changes from time to time,” says CBC social-media commentator Tod Maffin. “You want to be part of the swarm, and to do that you have to be a trusted member.”
So don’t bother your new-media friends with ads and press releases; they’ll just be tossed into spam folders. If you want to engage bloggers, start blogging, and commenting on their blogs. You want to get a Twitter campaign off the ground? Try establishing a helpful and cordial presence amongst the Tweeps. Make a YouTube video and share it. Join some groups on Facebook and build genuine relationships with the influencers. Treat others with respect and you’ll earn some for yourself. Participate in a free discussion.
At least that’s the way organizations that want that free discussion do it. The International Olympic Committee, on the other hand, stifles free discussion by trying to exert strict control over the message. Olympic athletes for the 2008 Beijing Games, for instance, were informed that their blog content had to be confined to their own experience; they could not comment on athletes in other events. Even mainstream-media journalists hoping to cover the Olympics have to meet strict accreditation requirements – requirements aimed at producing content that will meet the expectations of sponsors, according to Leverage Olympic Momentum author Maurice Cardinal. As a result, even many mainstream journalists choose not to participate.
As for engaging the new generation of journalists raised on social media, Olympics organizers went out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot. In late 2008, VANOC rebuffed approaches by founders of a proposed 2010 Independent Media Centre (IMC) for bloggers and social-media enthusiasts. Lacking mainstream-media backing and a press pass, representatives were unceremoniously escorted from the building by security from a VANOC press briefing and told to join the protesters outside.
IMC spokesperson and web 2.0 entrepreneur Kris Krug says the people behind his group are overwhelmingly pro-Olympics and pro-business and are not remotely related to such groups as the new-media anarchists behind the Resistance 2010 campaign, with their No Olympics on Stolen Native Land motto. The knee-jerk rejection of IMC delivered a potential ally directly into the arms of the radical fringe of Olympics protestors.
The primary goal for any social-media strategy is to determine who your fans are and where to start the social-media conversation. “When you begin to find those influencers, engage them,” Maffin says. Succeeding with social media is not about control but about participation.
Jonathon Narvey is a Vancouver writer and communications specialist. He blogs at jnarvey.com
