By: Ravi Sinha
Track2Realty Exclusive: Friends handling the social media of realty companies take an offence when social media is being criticised to be overused due to strategic dilemma. “Don’t blame the medium for human follies,” is the argument in general. Actually one of the friends from the online community wrote a blog post on the issue with the same title and started a discussion thread on the LinkedIn.
The series of arguments and counter-arguments had gone unnoticed had I not sensed a profile fixation in the thought process on the subject. While those who supported the theory of social sites’ role being confined to sharing and expressing professional info belonged to various professions, most of the die-hard newsy community was from media and communications.
They make you believe that it is a revolution of sorts in a country where the advent of computers in the mid ‘90s led to a number of journalists getting axed out of the system since they could not adapt to the new technology.
Coming back to the core issue of social media being overused/misused, the question is do real estate companies give the devil more than its due?
Recently in the wake of a bad press, a large real estate company handed over its crisis management to the PR agency which suggested the exclusive social media solutions, since the target audience has been net savvy. This made many communication professionals introspect as to whether the social media is fast taking over the prime time or there is a strategic PR dilemma which is leading to over reliance on this new age medium.
Unfortunately, what is happening is that like in the early days of Web design, SEO, PPC, email, and banners before it, there is too much swooning and not enough thinking about social media right now. PR professionals are so engrossed in “how to use it” that they often don’t even think “why to use it”.
The philosophy of relying on the exclusive use of social media under the pretext of the target audience being net savvy is in my opinion an anti-thesis of branding. This is because the very ethos of branding suggests that the brand is built by audience far greater than those who actually use the product. But at times such quick-fix solutions seem to be a win-win situation for both the agency and the client, since this agency also quotes the least price in the competitive pitch.
Some of the PR professionals are regularly into the habit of tweeting before every press conference. However, on a closer look one can notice that none of their followers are actually the beat reporters for whom it has been tweeted. That points to the core issue as to whether Twitter is to express or to impress.
For the new breed of media and communication professionals it seems to be a tool to impress. They are probably compensating for the failure of their previous generation to adapt to the new age technology with computer. And that is something which is quite funny. Isn’t?
Another practitioner of brand strategy and management was recently caught off guard in a presentation where he emphasised the need for the use of new age communicational tools like the Twitter. What this smart operator had failed to realise was that the realty company had their own internal team for the purpose of online tracking. When they did a Google check on his credentials, before inviting him for the formal presentation, they found out that he had a healthy follower list of five.
…to be continued
