Does social media force companies to be more honest? Or just an illusion?

July 19, 2009

Companies these days must provide true value in order to survive in the market, making false claims and only advertising tactics can not save a poor developed product/ service anymore. The reason it happened is that the new online catalogs are no longer under companies’ websites, but they are spread all over social media with comments and reviews with rating systems. So here’s the problem, is social media really forcing companies to be more honest?

Here are my thoughts

Social media for the marketplace is like a new developed law, which was created to let people easily share their experience on products and services with people from all around the world; however, like any other law, there will always be someone break it.
With all the social media listening tools, companies now have the power to run a market research in a more direct, cost effective, and possibly more accurate way. Here’s the problem, some companies hire people to post comments on influential sites, although online space is becoming more and more trustworthy, these companies are ruining the online community.
People like to share on the internet, especially secretspeople are more likely to share secrets and personal information online because it appears to the user that they are more annonymous than in real life.
Companies who are not honest on social media will be exposed eventually and their reputation will be gone!

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A Little Something About Tim:

Tim Ho

I'm a Regional Digital Strategist at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence APAC. I love web designing, data visualization, latin music, cooking, painting, inventing new drinks, and monkeys. Here is my main blog where I share social media news, ideas and insights. I also have a more personal blog called Tim Ho's Monkey!

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  • http://www.profiles-connectdirector.com/ global personal networking

    Great topic!!
    Thanks for the discussion.

    Stay connected with friends at global personal networking.

  • http://tim-ho.com Tim Ho

    Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it!

  • http://www.filination.com/blog Fili

    This is a very complex topic. My feeling is that having online social power does contribute to more transparency (Chinese netizens being an excellent example with authoritarian China), but also makes companies (and people, BTW) far more susceptible to abuse and attack regardless of honesty and responsibility. A single person or a small group of people can effectively create unbelievable damage to a reputation of a company without any accountability or even a clear identity of who they are. Crisis management becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, in such cases.

    Companies would be more honest if we assume that the online movements are honest and unbiased, which is not always the case. The implications for companies are far fetching.

  • http://www.filination.com/blog Fili

    This is a very complex topic. My feeling is that having online social power does contribute to more transparency (Chinese netizens being an excellent example with authoritarian China), but also makes companies (and people, BTW) far more susceptible to abuse and attack regardless of honesty and responsibility. A single person or a small group of people can effectively create unbelievable damage to a reputation of a company without any accountability or even a clear identity of who they are. Crisis management becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, in such cases.

    Companies would be more honest if we assume that the online movements are honest and unbiased, which is not always the case. The implications for companies are far fetching.

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