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Friday, February 11, 2011

Personal sans Professional

Working in the world of social media, there's often a dilemma that I feel is something worth discussing. Social Networks allow customers and clients exist on the same terrain, so it becomes quite simple to overlap the two. What this means is, that if I were a customer of Mercedes Benz and I found something on their Facebook page that I liked, I could very easily share it on my own personal space (wall).

The conflict that arises is, what about when they're your clients? How often do you plug your client's campaigns, apps, pages, etc. on your own personal space. I'm not saying, you shouldn't like their status updates or re-tweet any of their offer. What I'm specifically leaning towards is doing things like blatanlty tweeting, "check out this brand's awesome page xxxx wow!" (or the like) or tagging them in a Facebook status update "You guys should head on over to xxxx now!" (or the like)

So I went ahead and asked this on the Digital Media UAE Facebook page. In retrospect, I should have probably phrased my question a bit better, but in the words of Alexander McNabb, the internet is self - correcting, so my point was found out and debated. One of the sentiments agreed upon was that while it's nice if you do plug your clients, overdoing reduces your credibility. The most prevalent thought, the one many agreed with, is the only reason you should plug your clients is because you actually like the products or services that they have to offer. In fact, Wassim Moumneh went further to say that, "you'll not only look like a tard bumping [product] on your personal property, but will lose all credibility to do so when you're lucky enough to get the chance to work with something that you do believe in and want to support."

Nagham Akileh also shared her input saying, "you lose credibility if you plug 'em in posts unless you truly believe in the product/service/cause regardless of the work you do for it." However, my favourite answer to the thread was by Nora Bakhsh, a recent graduate from the American University in Sharjah, who said, "the whole point of handling a client's page is making it seem like they're doing it themselves."

I have to agree that, you should be able to successfully separate a personal social network account from any work that you happen to do on social networks. Suffice to say, you will rarely see me plugging my clients in my Twitter, my blog or my Facebook page. :)



4 comments:

Nora Bakhsh said...

Great blogpost, Mali. Glad to have been a part of it :)

Mich said...

Well said! :-)

Yasmin @ Red Panda Bakes said...

Very true. I made the mistake of doing that a while ago (not going to point out with who! :P) But I did, for a short while, lose some credibility. People start to feel like you're just shoving the product in their face and no one wants that.

Alexander said...

It can actually be something of an issue - what happens when your client has a crap radio ad or woeful customer service? Do you blog and tweet it or ignore it?

I ignore, but am aware sometimes that my client's getting a sort of social media immunity they wouldn't have if they weren't paying me. At this stage I usually curl up in a corner muttering about iterative feedback loops.