On December 18th I spoke at Ohio Web Leaders (OWL) with Brian Link (former Digg Exec and now BE Interactive Consulting) and Angela Siefer (Shiny Door) about coprorate myths and fears having to do with social media. A PDF of our preso can be found here.

We started off with a brief intro and then had the 60 attendees break into small groups to come up with fears/reservations that they personally or their companies/organizations had with regard to social media. The list was pretty telling of corporate attitude toward social media, so I thought I’d share. Great material here for anyone looking to engage a corporate entity in SM consulting. A few of the companies in attendance were: AAA, Nationwide, Children’s Hospital, Resource Interactive, People To My Site, COSI, TechColumbus, Queen City Angels and more.

Afraid of broadcasting private company information and losing control of messages.

Worried about proving ROI -what is the result and cost?

Time waste for employees - loss of productivity

Bad/wrong info being distributed

Keeping up with the pace and the pure volume of etiquette, dos and donts, new technology, etc

Big stories (dell, comcast, zappos) don’t translate to my organization

Sabotage/negative efforts by competitors

Ability to make it 2 way vs 1 way. what if people dont talk back?

Support and sustainability of a campaign/initiative

Targeting/audience - are the people I want to talk to using social media?

Capacity to handle it in terms of personnel? Who owns it in the organization?

Getting internal (specifically upward) adoption

Generational - is this a FAD? Invest now, flavor of the day?

Compliance and legal!

Difficulty integrating with existing campaigns and efforts

Brands in social media are not authentic (perception)

Loss of face-to-face communication skills

I think many of these are consistent per what I’ve encountered. Some are legitimate and need to be addressed strategically and some are simply the misconceptions and/or resistence to change in engagement realities.

Are these consistent with what you’ve heard?