I’m  interested to see how a large telecom company in Sri Lanka responds to the blog post linked I’ve linked to above. Dialog Telekom does make an attempt to use social media including Facebook,  Twitter and blogging. The breadth of social media coverage is good even if the implementation leaves something to be desired;  social media isn’t particularly well integrated with their website and oddly they don’t seem to link to their blog from their corporate site.

If they are serious about social media, they should be monitoring the conversation around their brand and respond to the complaint from the customer who wrote the blog post.

It’s fascinating from an architectural POV and from a marketing perspective – particularly in light of the recent problems the company has faced re. its cars. The timing of the launch is interesting. Perhaps a case of “If you can’t control the conversation at least gain some control over the conversation space.” ?

I see the first two in particular reflected in Sri Lankan companies using social media. It’s exactly what happened when they started blogging a few years ago.

Based on my working experience, there’s probably three reasons for this:

1) General ignorance about how best to use social media

2) Fear that reflecting on the big picture might lead to “OMG! Our customers might notice we have competitors!!!”

3) Old media marketers using social media as “ADVERTISING”. not as a means of engaging the wider world.

Mind numbingly short-sighted article. Aside from the business benefits of social media, with the profusion of mobile devices capable of accessing the internet, this is no solution to the “problem”.