5 key mistakes companies make in social media

Many failings arise from misguided or half-hearted efforts to participate

“It’s not rocket surgery.”

That malapropism became a bit of a mantra at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down, it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and build trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

So why is it so difficult for so many companies to integrate social media successfully? I dug through my (30 pages of) notes to try to find some themes in what the speakers shared and came up with a this list of why organizations might be getting hung up:

1. They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products