Social media creates—not solves—communication problems

In the race to add social media to the communicator’s toolbox, we risk lowering corporate communications standards

Until I read Andrew Keen’s excellent new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, I was beginning to think that I was alone in my unease in response to the astounding hype that surrounds the promotion of ‘social media’ both inside and outside companies. For openers what bugs me about that term is that it is so vague. What makes a medium ‘social?’ As far as I can tell, there’s only one prerequisite. It requires more than one participant.

Dialogue is important, but do you want to risk your professional reputation in recommending communication channels whose primary purpose is only to encourage dialogue among a few people within an organization? In my experience that happens in the natural course of events anyway, especially with the proliferation of technology that exists today.