by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)
Just over a year ago, we interviewed Marc Monseau at BDIs Social Communications and Healthcare conference. The three topics that he brought up then were so important then – and now – that we thought it was important to revisit them.
Being Personal
Marc talked about the importance of being personal on social media, and how that was just as important – although tricky – for a large corporate entity as for a person. He noted that it was particularly important to enable experts in a corporation to speak up in their own individual voice in social media. “To be able to connect with people on a personal level, you have to behave in a personal way, he said.
Being Relevant
He also discussed the balance between being personal and being relevant to your audience. It wasnt an impossible balance, he noted. You just had to understand who your audience was, and then you could discover what would be relevant information for you to provide to them.
Being Trusted – and Trusting
Mutual respect engenders mutual trust, Marc said, giving a social-media ambassador the power to “move with alacrity on behalf of a corporation. The corporation must trust its ambassador to understand the issues and the necessary limits, and the ambassador must deserve that trust.
Its no surprise that Marc – who in mid-May announced that he would be opening his own shop after managing one of the industrys most groundbreaking social-media presences – should have focused us on hot topics that remain just as interesting a year later. He kept J&Js blog, Twitter feed and Facebook focused on hot topics for the four years he managed them – and he did so by following the rules he outlined above:
- Being personal – While all of the companys social-media properties were obviously owned by the corporation, he was very well known personally and his posts and tweets were very much his own.
- Being relevant – After 14 years with J&J, and 18 working in and around the healthcare industry, nobody better understands the concerns of the industry, its supporting vendors and its clients.
- Being trusted – To take one of the largest and most highly regulated companies on the planet into a new communications channel, you have to be pretty trusted. To do it well, you have to really deserve that trust. Marcs experience is a veritable case study.
Sometimes the social-media world turns so rapidly that topics are old news in the blink of an eye. But the real issues – deserving respect, providing value, being transparent – are just as important every day as they always have been. We think thats worth remembering.
