Social media. It is thought of by many companies as the domain of the clinically bored, and by many marketers as being actively dangerous towards the corporate image.

In the right or wrong hands, social media (that is, blogging and the use of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) can be the difference between a company being accepted as cool and being a laughing stock. When marketers only use social media to throw out the company line, they quite often miss the point of the medium.

Talking trendy

Consider the old example set by Sony. A few years ago, they set up a site called www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com. It purported to be by normal people – consumers – who all talked about how they wanted Sony PSPs for Christmas. Unfortunately, when writing the entries, the Sony marketing team decided to talk trendy, emulating the voices of their target audience. Real consumers quickly discovered the ploy, and the site was closed in a haze of embarrassment.

That’s an extreme example, but many social media projects in the corporate world tend to veer between lifeless twaddle about how great a company thinks it is and actual marketing spam (such as Habitat’s brief, ill-fated foray into Twitter).

As a consumer, I don’t care about how great a company thinks it is. I care about how great (or not) a company actually is. For that, I need social media that engages consumers enough that they feel compelled to respond, either by reviewing products or by replying to tweets or commenting on a blog. A company doesn’t have to rip apart its own products, but it should be mature enough to recognise that, in the eyes of the consumers, they’re not perfect.

Recognition of imperfection

The best companies for recognising this need for community dialogue and feedback tend to be the social media sites themselves. Flickr, the online photo sharing site, has been known to apologise when users are inconvenienced by the site, and Twitter has the now-famous ‘fail whale‘ for when the site is broken.

But what about the company line? When we started this blog, there was some discussion about article checking. How much editorial control should be wielded over the writers? Is there a company line to tow? Where is it? We decided that – within reason, of course – the writers should be able to express their opinions. If they disagreed with each other, then fine. As long as they do so in clear written English, that’s okay. On our Twitter account, we occasionally drop the clear written English as well.

UK supermarket Asda recently put a video up on YouTube. It was a response to a vandal that had plagued one of the stores, and it’s a brilliantly put together series of interviews with staff about how they felt about the attacks. It’s candid, honest and – above all – far better publicity than anything the marketing team could have cooked up.