Conversational Media: Social Media and the Wall Street Crisis

In the past few days everyone's attention was drawn to the financial crisis and how it is going to affect individuals and businesses.
Are troubles on Wall Street good or bad for Social Media? Could the use of any kind of social media at Lehman Brothers have acted as a barometer? What elements connect the Federal bailout of international financial services firms and Social Media?
According to MediaPost's Social Media Insider, networking, as in business networking, will be hotter than ever. This, along with the fact that we’ll be spending more time at home, will drive up traffic to social media sites. On the other side, because for most marketers social media is still an experiment, advertisers probably will pull back on social ad spending, unless they can prove its efficacy.

The problem with social media is that, as a marketing medium, it’s about where Internet advertising was in 2000: really cool, part of a hot, new medium, but with metrics that make it hard to sell to the CFO.

CEO blogger Debbie Weil expresses dismay that the 25,000 Lehman Brothers employees learned of the firm's decision to file for bankruptcy allegedly through the New York Times.

Are we to conclude that Lehman has no internal blog with RSS alerts, no Twittering Execs (who could protect their Tweets, of course, so they wouldn't be publicly visible), no interest in using social media tools to stay connected to their employees and treat them with courtesy and respect?

Albert Maruggi believes that some aspects of our corporate culture need to change if social media is to become integrated into America’s regular business environment. He finds the connection between the bailout of financial services firms and social media in some of the elements that he believes will be part of the response to this mess: great transparency and disclosure; institutional incentives that are longer term in nature; accomodations for the interconnected nature of economies.

Last year at the Society of New Communications Research symposium we had several excellent group conversations about the limitations placed by the finance and legal departments on social media implementation in a corporate environment.
We surely have a long way to go in addressing these cultural obstacles. As the dust settles around Wall Street, the blame assessed and the remedies constructed to prevent a reoccurrence, watch for these elements of longer-term corporate perspective incentives and greater disclosure. These characteristics will help social media advocates change a corporate culture in ways that will allow the organization to see greater benefit from social media.

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What person can say that communication is not important? absolutely nobody, I think that all new technologies that make reference to the communication is a major breakthrough. come a day when everyone will have access to the Internet and unimaginable signals.

Posted by: Impotence causes | October 06, 2010 at 02:25 PM