The Cost of Paying Lip Service

I just read this piece by David Weinberger about how the Internet wasn’t especially useful to him during the traffic misery caused by the Iceland volcano issue. The services work fine when everything is going well, but when the crisis hit, the sites became immediately useless.

I’m not surprised, but I’m also wondering what we can all take from that. See, the problem is that our social media efforts will fail the same way. News issues and concerns hit companies all the time. How do they respond? I just went looking for a few social media people who I imagined would be responding to international news stories about their company. Not a word. So, instead of being lit up to keep relationships afloat, I’m seeing silence.

When the going gets tough, how will you respond on these new social channels? How will you use the Internet as a primary driver instead of as a bolt-on?

David Weinberger’s story points out that the Internet presence of these companies was obviously an afterthought to their telephone presence. More than two decades after companies have come to the web, they still look at their online presence as secondary.

Social media’s even newer. How will it fare?

Something to think about. Are you in? Or are you just setting up a facade?