In the many different roles I have played in my career, one of the great frustrations I have encountered is the corporate top-down mentality and their reliance on “broadcasting” in a singular direction: top-down, one way. You ever get the feeling that most big companies really don’t give a darn what consumers think?

In consulting positions I have held, I notice that the corporate clients tend to design their systems quite deliberately to block incoming feedback from employees, customers and stakeholders. The rationale is that they don’t want to spend a lot of time or money on frivolous complaints. Yet those same companies often spend millions of dollars holding “focus groups” to get feedback so they can better understand their client’s needs. The feedback through the focus group process is invariably skewed, especially where it comes to employee feedback. Employees simply do not feel comfortable giving honest feedback, especially when they know it won’t be what management wants to hear. Customers who are paid for feedback suffer from a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome” where they tend to identify with their momentary captors, can can sometimes provide the feedback the company wants to hear.

At one web company I once consulted for, they actually set up a reporting system that was set up to block access to the very people they were soliciting input from. The reporting system had been designed by the designer of the system with little outside direction. Nobody had thought to check the system to ensure it was accessible to the target audience. On the sales floor, everyone was complaining about the system, yet management was convinced everyone found it highly useful. After all, there weren’t many complaints! Talking to the staff, I realized that there was a strong corp-culture message: “Don’t criticize the system to management.” Management seemed shocked when I reported how universally reviled the system had become, but management was so invested in that system that they continued status-quo despite its obvious and easily-repaired shortcomings.

Our fear of negative feedback is one of the single-largest roadblocks to success in our culture. I have seen tremendous efforts made at every level to avoid the dreaded “critique”. Yet blunt, honest criticism can be incredibly valuable. How can you know where you can improve your services or products if you go out of your way to avoid any critical input?

My advice to large or small companies … shave a few grand out of your focus group budget and hire a manager to oversee and analyze incoming emails from your key audiences. Set up an anonymous relay for your employees so they can provide honest feedback without fear of retribution from management (in their own department or others). Ideally, find an independent  consultant who doesn’t have a stake in your decision-making process. I provide screening and analysis to small and medium-sized companies and training services to larger companies to integrate feedback management as part of an over-all usability and marketing strategy. Contact me for an initial consultation.

Several years ago, when brandijasmine.com was my primary art site, I had some popular pages for Pumpkin Carving Patterns here. Those designs are still available, but have been moved to my art site at bjasmine.com. Please click here to download the patterns, and if you have bookmarks, please update them. Thank you and Happy Hallowe’en!

There is a lot of hype out in cyberspace about social media management. Every social media manager/guru on Facebook or Twitter who is selling the latest “Get Rich Quick Social Media Study Program” will tell you that all you have to do is whip some text together on a couple of the social media sites and you can retire to Barbados with them, sucking down Pina Coladas as you occasionally peck out a pithy quote to your growing list of friends and followers.

This may be an odd position for a social media consultant to take, but it’s an honest one. I am good at building lists of followers, great at creating content, and terrific at managing customer interactions for my clients (if I do say so myself).

BUT …

I have not yet found that social media activity actually translates to increased sales, or even increased web traffic for a small or micro-sized business, the very people who need that most. The only people I see claiming that are the social media gurus. I have looked into a number of online classes, and they all repeat the same hype and bumpfh, but none of them really give you any secrets for making a buck or even getting your signal out of the noise cloud. If you have found one that you are not affiliating for … email me. If you are hyping or marketing one, send it to me, and I’ll review it. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong about this.

Social media sites do offer the opportunity to improve customer service, increase your brand awareness, and better engage with customers, but that part should be a no-brainer. The rubber meets the road in the pocketbook. You and I can do that stuff on our own web sites. We don’t need Twitter or Facebook for that. The only ROI the social media sites truly offer us is one more place to be found. Otherwise, they are actually a resource negative.

As a marketing effort so far I have found Facebook and Twitter to be a monumental waste of time. At this point, I don’t think anyone is really making a decent buck in social media except those people who are selling classes! I’ll be willing to dramatically revise that assessment if someone can clue me in on how it’s done. And please don’t quote success stories at me like “Look at Aston Kutcher!” … that guy was already famous before he found Twitter. I’d say Twitter has benefited more from him than he has from them. There are occasional (and usually bizarre) exceptions … but I want to know how they succeeded in turning their social media traffic into profits.

Right now I tell my clients the only reasons to be on FB and Twitter are to offer improved customer service, build their reputation, possibly increase brand awareness, and engage with existing customers. I tell them it is one more place they should be found to have a presence online, and I can help them do that. But until someone shows me a working model of how to reliably translate those presences into profit, I will continue to advise them to spend only a minimal amount of time and effort on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media platforms as part of their marketing campaigns.

A social media manager or virtual assistant is a person who manages social media sites on behalf of other people and businesses. If you want to have an active Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube or other social media presence, but don’t have the time or know-how to set them up, you can hire someone to take over these sites for you.

I have a great deal of experience with social media management, web site design and online marketing. For several years, I was the TUCOWS.com media relations director, editor in chief, review writer, I even ghost-wrote reviews for their CEO in Boardwatch Magazine. Few people outside Toronto know that at the time of the peak growth of the Internet during the 1990′s TUCOWS also owned an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and web portal (iDirect and MyDirect, respectively). I was iDirect’s chief communications officer, abuse admin, portal content manager, and the author of the new user manual that is still in use at the company that currently runs their old servers. You could say that manual was a best seller – there are over 400,000 copies of the booklet in print!

Now I’m an independent digital media consultant, designer and social media developer, and I have room in my portfolio for a few select clients. If you are seeking outsourced or off-site talent to run your campaigns, or are looking for a consultant to assist with developing an online strategy across multiple sites, please contact me for an initial consultation.

Once upon a time, BrandJasmine.com was my art gallery page. Jasmine’s Gallery has now moved to www.bjasmine.com. This page is still in progress, but here I plan to focus more on web design, media relations, and social media management, among other things. I’m still setting up at the moment so please bear with me for the moment. If you would like to be notified when this site is fully up and running, please subscribe to the RSS Feed, follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook.