Social Media Myths

Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 26th, 2010

Joel Postman has a good post on socialmediatoday.com that touches on 5 social media myths. It’s worth a read.

There are quite a few myths out there. We hear quite a bit about them at the AHA office. Many of the standard ones are listed in Joel’s piece.

We’re always interested in how organizations perceive the use of social media and what the misinformation or misunderstandings might be.

One of the myths that is sometimes overlooked is that social media is “different” than PR. This doesn’t mean that PR “owns” social media or that, depending on the scope of the campaign, that it isn’t smart to bring in a social media expert to build an online community or to drive community engagement. The communications team, specialist, consultant or agency should be a strong contributor to the planning and execution of any campaign that reaches out and touches the public. Social media is a form of marketing that blends with public relations. Even back in the day, smart organizations made sure that their communications team was engaged with the advertising team.

Getting all elements of your marketing and communications outreach at the table during planning is crucial. Social media planned and implemented in isolation won’t work in the long run and it can create challenges if PR, social media and other marketing areas are segmented from each other. Success takes a team effort.