Last night I attended Aucklands Social Media Club ( #smcakl ) held at the Saatchi Building.

I had been planning to attend for a couple of months, but last night was more than appropriate as Rebecca Smith (twitter @becs355 ) from Telecom was speaking – along with Vaughn Davis and David Farrier.

I work with Becs as part of the Online Response Team for Telecom New Zealand.
We are a small group of volunteers that tweet, facebook and forum in response to questions and comments posed to the company.  We all go about our normal day jobs and our normal lives but also perform this service for our company and our customers and I think it is interesting to note that none of the team are in Customer Services or Marketing/P.R.

brand-nameThe subject of last nights #smcakl was “Brand Voice: balancing personal and corporate tone in Social Media.”

Without breaking it down into a complete synopsis of what each speaker had to say, it appeared that the major messages were similar.

1.  It is hard, near impossible, to decide to have a ‘voice’ or tone to company social media so do not even try.

2.  People will talk about your company – give them a window into it, rather than a wall to block them out.

3.  It is the honest communication that keeps the conversation alive.

4.  We are all just doing our thing, being the people that we are.  Those who are your natural brand ambassadors will become apparent.

Companies do not really want to be bad mouthed, especially by their staff, however it will happen.  And it does.
It seems that the more information you give to all staff, and also to your customers, about what is happening inside your company, then the more support they will give you when things might go bad.  As they do.

The best voice of our companies is the natural one.  As Becs said, those who are natually online and naturally onbrand.

This raised a eyebrow or two when Vaughn started to speak given that his first paragraph was regarding Ma’a Nonu and his 7 fucks in 3 minutes after the Hurricanes beat the Chiefs in a recent Super 14 match.

The point that most interested me was Vaughn said he felt none of the billboards he had seen had demonstrated any of the passion that those 7 fucks on the radio did.
And the more I thought about it, the more it rang true.
Aside from all the laughing in the background – which makes me think Ma’a was a bit more than put up to it – it was more real than the old “cheers to the ladies in the kitchen, rugby was the winner on the day” line.

I have a personal twitter account – @tarasutherland and a Facebook page.
I also have a twitter account for Dive Mistress – my Scuba Dive brand.  And a Facebook Page.
As well as that, I work part time for Global Dive and I run their website, Facebook page and Twitter account.
And just recently, I have become ^TS on Twitter for telecomNZ Online Response team.

I am not each of those people for around an hour a day.  I am always every single one of them.  I am my brand and my brand is me – regardless of who I am communicating with – which community if you will.
And most people know that it is me that is doing it.  Not once have I had a tone discussion with any of the above.
So whilst I do need to be mindful that one might affect the other, I do hope that my personality, responsibility and attitude shows through each one of them.  And are deemed appropriate for them by the community as I feel that the best judge of what should and can be said in Social Media by a company is those of us that it is being said to.

Social Media has all these great tools and probably more that I have not discovered yet.
One of the unanswered questions I had last night was “And? …. What Else?”

We use these tools to open that window into our businesses and ourselves – to show people what we are up to.  But even more importantly than that now, to see what our people; customers, friends, family, competitors are up to.  To peep in their windows if you will.  Which is why reciprocating is so important – following back.  A conversation does not have one side – thats just broadcasting.

And in summary, I saw a great comment this morning that wraps this up quite nicely – from Mike Stenger :
“Whether you call it social media or web 2.0, just remember that there’s people like you & I behind it.”

Posterous has Vaughn’s summary here.