Selected participation in the social web following the Social Media Academy’s NCP Model. This week I seemed to have a theme of social injustice, activism, B2B company focus.

Rick’s Blog – Nestle Social Media – Nestea Plunge

In regards to a blog post about Nestle’s social media activity and participation as well as whether they are paying attention to the negative sentiment about where they source products.

Rick, just recently I attended a conference with Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines (and chief social media / blogger) who gave an interesting assessment of what they did wrong in navigating the social media world as they started to blog.  They did learn from it and then did do more things right than wrong in the use of social media – specifically blogging, during some troubled times.

Overall, being upfront when problems occur, getting others, including the company to explain how they interpreted the issue, and being actively engaged with the conversation helped to reduce the sensationalism of each occurrence. The three examples she provided were

1) a customer was asked to change their clothes (too revealing).  That story hit the bloggers as discrimination and SWA tried to just ignore it. Wrong effort.

2) The second example was a decision to eliminate open seating on SWA flights.  It was going to be eliminated based on internal company opinion. Instead they asked the blogosphere.  Over 700 comments were received that indicated they should keep it. And they did.

3) last was an incident involving 2 girls who were so badly behaved on a flight that the police were called when they landed.  The girls immediately made videos and held press conferences, claiming they did nothing wrong except they were good looking.  This time SWA took immediate action and released interviews from people on the plane, SWA representatives, talked to bloggers and posted their own story on the SWA blog.  Much reduced situation compared to the prior incident.

I don’t want to say that issues about airline seating are exactly comparable with dealing with a repressive regimes but what I think this points out is that authentic communication, listening to your readers and customers, reacting quickly via Internet can help manage problems and overall keep the trust that customers have with companies.

I think that you are right in suggesting that Nestle needs to have a more visible dialogue with people who eat and invest in Nestle. And what if the overall sentiment is that they should pull out of the current supply chain because of the negative sentiment?  I would think they should take the advice or leanings of  the public since we know what a viral, Internet-connected crowdsource can do to spread bad info.

Five reasons corporations are failing at social media – Social Media Today (Amy Menger).

In regards to a post with the themes she pulled out from the recent Inbound Marketing Summit. This was a very active conversation on SMT and her blog where the article was also posted.

Amy et all,

Great dialogue here about an interesting topic.  Maybe the question is not why or why not corporations are human or whether they “get social media.”  Maybe we should just leave them alone until they are more receptive to the concept. After their customers have all left or when their competitors are snagging market share left and right, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a hard sell. Finding those companies that are ready, willing and able to embrace social media is our task.

I would like to suggest and even challenge each of the individuals who commented on this post and at your blog.  Do this – take on – pro bono – one non-profit who already understands the “human part,” who does not typically have the bureaucracy and is desperate for help of any kind to ensure its message gets out.

If each one of us as proclaimed “social media consultants” offered to help these underdogs and documented these positive stories, think about the power of that message. Think about the power of the results.  Not just more airline seats sold, not more computers sold, not more shoes.

Instead clean water for communities with unsafe drinking and sanitation food for starving children, mentors for kids without parents; cures for people with disease.

Yes social media has a lot of power, but lets put our money and time in some good places too. Then you will have the best kind of positive stories to move and motivate corporate America to use the tool as it should be.

I am starting with www.projectgirl.org.  We used social media to win a grant from BestBuy and plan to do more.

What about you?

Get ready. You no longer own your website. by Dave Neelsen www.storyfirstgroup.com

In regards to a post about the new Google Sidewiki which is a collapsible browser sidebar:

This has so many negatives that out weigh the positives that it seems like it wasn’t thought through with input from the “people” in Google’s ecosystem.

I know they did not ask me.

Is this really a result of trying to monetize what starts out free?  What then do we have in store for all our favorite free social media sites?

Have you considered segmenting your Twitter strategy? (Social Media Today)

by  Daryl Pereira – In regards to comments on have various strategies in the B2B market to approach Twitter for different departments in an organization.

I am a big proponent, when working with any size b2b client, to have a social media manager who is in charge or unifying, training and coordinating the integrated conversations between departments of an organization.  At a larger company this person may not be directly engaged in social media efforts at all – maybe helping to develop the guidelines and policy.  In a smaller organization they may have multiple roles or it can be an outside consultant who provides 360 degree feedback to the team and facilitates the internal dialogue necessary to figure out when and where the conversations need to come back.

We should recognize that customer service talking to customers with product failures, needs to talk with the sales team about the customer and also to relay there are issues – so don’t sell more until they are resolved. The engineering and product teams need to be in the loop to make sure they look into the problem with the vendor and can respond to both sales and customer support.

Any strategy created for social media needs to be flexible, adaptable and ready to change as quickly as the technology is changing – before our customers decide to  source elsewhere.