Chris Pirillo has nine excellent points about how to do business on the Web. I’d like to expand on his first point.
Chris writes:
It’s not just about having an open mind; it’s about having an open strategy. You can’t control the Internet. Once you put something out there for the world to consume, assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered. It doesn’t matter if it’s audio, video, text, software, hardware or any other service—they’ll want to use it in ways that you can’t even imagine.
This is what Michael Raynor was talking about when he told PR Squared’s Todd Defren that social media injects additional uncertainty into business operations.
And it has more serious implications than the simple re-purposing of content. Businesses need to approach all aspects of social media with an open strategy. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, nobody can control the pace or subject matter of a conversation online. Each individual that participates can take any discussion or line of thought in myriad new ways.
So how does traditional goal-setting jibe with this lack of control? I think it works something like this:
- Set a reasonable goal for your online interaction.
- Listen to each individual and how the community responds to the individual.
- Ask intelligent questions and listen to the responses.
- Ask, “is my reasonable goal still reasonable?”
- Either adjust goals to fit community response, or take another step toward your goal.
- Repeat steps 2-5.
What do you guys think?
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