Panel Beating

So, I’m on a panel about how brands can benefit or suffer from involve­ment with social media at the forth­coming Blogging4Business event.

Good examples we all know about: Dell (addresses Dell Hell service com­plaints with its own blog; learns from early mistakes on said blog), Microsoft (developer social network; but also taking stick over its blogger laptop giveaway), Nokia (blogger rela­tions campaign)

Bad examples we all know about: Walmart (pretty much everything they do), Sony (fake blog), Ask (fake ‘under­ground’ campaign).

I’m on a panel with Antony ‘wrote the book about social media’ Mayfield, though, so I don’t want the examples that he’ll bring up — five seconds before I’m due to speak — leaving me with a con­tri­bu­tion that goes some­thing like ‘Yeah… err… Antony’s right. You do have to be careful and trans­parent and that.…’

I’ve already found an excel­lent positive example. Doggysnaps (beta) is a social network developed by the Dogs Trust. The gist of it is that you — a dog lover — upload pictures of your dog and look at the pictures uploaded by other members. It’s flickr for dogs, basic­ally, you can tag and comment on others’ snaps. There’s a dog of the week and a ton of forums giving dog care advice. What’s this got to do with neg­lected dogs, then? Well, the com­munity can also buy mer­chandise, donate directly, and I under­stand that there are plans to intro­duce a means to adopt dogs in care.

The bad example? That’s where you come in. Companies, please, that have gone about approaching social media in a totally cack-​​handed way, earning them torrents of abuse. Not-​​so-​​well-​​known cases espe­cially welcome. Via the comments or email, please.

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