Dell has had great success in this area but their founder personally understood the need and their already existing audiences are ideal for it. It became a competitive advantage for Dell to play offense rather than remain on defense and wait for the market to force them into a savvy social media position. So we’ll see who else has the chutzpah needed to follow that example. David is right.

I was involved half a year ago or so in the launch of a major European corporate social media newsroom, with varied success. Unfortunately, in the last minute, top level comm-people pulled the plug on commenting, for example.

This fear of opening up to criticism is something I think is widespread, and quite the challenge to overcome. (We were actually even forced to host the site off corporate hardware, as the PHP Wordpress installation would have never ever been allowed.)

That being said, tomorrow’s corporate social media newsroom probably demands a lot more than simply allowing comments, right? My partner in crime, Alexander D, and I today discussed what the next gen could become. We speculated that it would be the central hub for all things relating to that corporation, including criticism, controversy and even competitor actions.

Today Alexander and I were exposed to the perfect example at Rebtel. A competitor launched free SMS service. And we sit stunned. If we had a social media newsroom of what we see as the next generation, we both agreed that we would respond ASAP. In Rebtel’s case (again, speculation) we felt that an honest approach to this kind of wide coverage would eventually result in something completely separated from a regular old image-and-video-gathering-newsroom: it would become and authority. The go-to-place for all things Rebtel, and possibly even mobile VOIP.

What are your ideas? Where do you see corporate “a-person-like-me”-communication going in the near future?

All the best,
David