I’ve recently read an article in Inteligent Life discussing which city should be the next capital of the world (which makes for a very interesting read), but what caught my eye was how at some point the author describes the most common type of trade these days, where parts are manufactured separately and then shipped for assembly to form the end product.
Don't leave it to chance. The odds may stack up against you.
Every product starts of as a concept and goes on to be born from the individual parts produced by various manufacturers. Leaving aside any justification of cost that drives the production of these, one of the reasons why this happens is because each manufacturer can offer a strong advantage in the production of a certain part. While the final product does not yet exist, everyone involved in bringing the concept to life would know from the start how to go about achieving this. In short, they will have a strategy.
This got me thinking that the phenomenon of social media functions very much the same and this can spur an interesting approach to define social media strategy. It all probably starts off with a concept that identifies the main objective and the content created and shared on idividual social media platforms (representing the separately manufactured parts) that comes together in one place and constitutes the social media strategy.
So if one was to carry this analogy forward, it can be argued that post-production every product would undergo a quality control to determine if it all stacks up to expectations. Is this happening with companies social media strategy or are any discrepancies between the concept and the end product swept under the carpet? Imagine what the consequences would be if a car manufacturer would do that – or better yet just think back to the Toyota recall incident in January of this year Now think back to your social media strategy. Do you think this is pushing it too far? Then think if the worse should happen and your company’s reputation would literally go up in flames because one seemingly insignificant defect was overlooked.
