David Murray's Profile

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that new research from Hubspot shows that the majority of Twitter “members” have no followers, and have never tweeted. How would they know what to do? Has there ever been a more lonely club (online or off) than Twitter on day one? Nobody welcomes you. Nobody encourages you. You’re left to figure it out for yourself, using a woefully inadequate search tool, a bunch of abbreviations and lingo you don’t know, and a staccato communication style that values brevity over clarity.

But when Oprah and Ashton and the gang get the rest of the world involved, you cannot cede the customer experience to third parties. You can’t have your Web site being the 37th best way to use your own service. You can’t have a social networking service that does nothing to facilitate the creation of viable networks, other than “recommending” a list of interesting (but certainly not targeted) users and then swamping them with half a million new followers.

Social media isn't a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It's about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company.