Social media is all everyone in my world seems to be talking about these days. I even found the once skeptical me obsessed and constantly connected once I installed TwitterBerry for my Crackberry. Now you know what keeps me up at night or occupies me when I can't sleep.
On the one hand, as a professional in the PR world, I understand how valuable a tool social media can be in helping my message and my clients' message reach so many people directly and in real time. Instead of just shooting commercial messages into outerspace there are real opportunities to connect with real people. But the problem is that marketing/PR/social media folk want to connect over every channel available from Flickr and Youtube to Facebook and Twitter. I've been guilty of it myself, tweeting links to Facebook Fan Pages.
But something happens when I'm on the receiving end of these messages. Brands are offering me the right to choose which of 3 options to communicate and receive information. I go with Twitter because that's the tool I am most plugged into (and I not-so-secretly despise Facebook for personal use). I am indirectly telling a brand my preferred method of communication. I am telling a brand which is the best way for them to reach me 24 hours a day. Yet that's not enough. Brands will still request that I become a Fan on Facebook. But how does that help them get their messages across when I opt out of receiving updates from Fan Pages?
I know I will find myself guilty of committing this type of crime in the future, with tweets of Facebook Fan Page links and blog posts of Youtube videos with a Flickr stream asking that they Digg it, but I hope that with every tweet and every video posted the consumer inside me will pay close attention before the professional in me clicks “share” too quickly.
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