BusinessWeek: Top Mistake in Social Media Marketing? Not Monitoring!

Mike Proulx of Hill Holiday provides BusinessWeek with his Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes that companies make. Mike is our kind of guy, with social media monitoring being his #1 mistake:

1. Not (or Barely) Monitoring: Companies that do not first “listen” and observe how their evangelists and detractors talk about their brand risk jumping into a cyclone of unanticipated activity. Constant monitoring is a must.

Even a well-liked Internet brand can fall victim to lack of social media monitoring. In 2009, hackers exploited a vulnerability in online retailer Amazon.com’s (AMZN) site, causing all books by GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender) authors to disappear. Over the course of a weekend, thousands of consumers on Twitter, Facebook, and forums voiced their concern, suspecting that Amazon had made the authors unavailable deliberately. Two days later, when Amazon made an attempt to explain the glitch, people on Twitter already had created a hashtag further ridiculing the company’s ineptitude.

You could stop there, but then you’d miss out on the other 4 big mistakes companies make in social media.

Now, we just need to know, will Mike spot this blog post? 😛