Main mistakes of social-media managers

As the social-media is still too new trend in corporate communications, let's not talk about the "mistakes", but "failed experiments". At least, PR-effect is very long story, who knows where those missteps will lead their authors.

However, as Paul Holmes said on his lecture this April, there hasn’t appeared any fundamentally new thing during last 80 years in public relations. Generally speaking, the basis of all failures of web-PR-experiments are the same mistakes as in off-line. In my opinion, the main factors of bad luck are reluctant to listen to the audience, not understanding the difference between advertising and PR, the lack of originality and creativity, as well as unwarranted activity. As you can see, nothing new and it is typical for the Internet. Specific things - such as too long texts are too big/ small pictures, unattractive prizes for sweepstakes and confusing conditions – all this can be corrected by own or somebody’s practice. In addition, the information field on the Internet is changing rapidly, and today no one remember what exactly was so terrible on the company’s page a month ago. This is great advantage of online, but this is the main risk for you – you should always be faster, remembering that the competitors warm your back by their breath. And everybody is copying everything – or, ok we can say that the ideas are just flying on the air. So you burn three days and caught a brilliant idea, admired your "fans" and "likers", and next day after your neighbor added a couple features, and sowed in his audience. A week later, no one will remember who was the first, and the audience will become hungry for more fresh ideas. Lose the rhythm is another great risk for the PR-specialist.