I just wanted to make the point that a profile page can be a good engagement tool with the right content and should not be dismissed out of hand.

Alas, we digress. Thanks for this Damien , it is important to put this topic up for debate and discussion and have less of the “smoke and mirrors”!!

Philip, to be fair to Damien I think that his criticisms are not being laid at the door of the social network sites, but at the agencies who themselves might not understand the full potential of social media and are thus possibly under-selling “engagement” with the audience. The other side which is also likely is that agencies know exactly what is involved but their clients just don’t have the funds or the resources internally to support a full engagement campaign.

People out there, including agencies are telling people buy ads on sites and pay a lot of money to offer a custom skin for profiles. They call this engagement. It is not. Engagement is two way, this is simply advertising. I’d be happy to be proved wrong though if you have statistics showing otherwise.

keith

Good stuff. Though perhaps you might expand on the point of

If people tell you creating a skinned mySpace profile or Bebo profile is social media “engagement”, don’t hire them.

Whilest I agree the creation of the skins and profile does not an engagement campaign make, I still believe that this type of marketing, if done correctly (tons of content , relevance to the audience, constant conversation)can be a hugely powerful engagement tool.

The rest of your list is spot on and highlights well the challenge our group has ahead of it.

As well As “dont hire them if…” what would someone say for a “do hire them if..” type list. As in, what should someone look for?

Thanks for the support. One of the things the Social Media Working Group is going to try and do is to walk the walk. As a group we are going to work collaboratively using social media technologies and in as many ways as are possible to engage the wider online community (where in my mind at least the expertise already exists) in the process. So whether it be engaging with blogs, inviting contributions to wikis, or running workshops; our intention is that we certainly won’t be a bunch of people sitting in a room coming up with the answers in isolation. You can hold us to that too.

Brendan