The Social Media Experiments Continue

Sanjay Mehta,

Joint CEO, Social Wavelength

Sanjay Mehta is the Joint CEO of Social Wavelength, which is a social media agency. It was founded in 2009 by Sanjay Mehta, Hareesh Tibrewala, and Mihir Karkare. It is a brand of Social OR Outsourcing and provides a variety of solutions to fulfill companies and brands’ social media needs. The company had raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its second round of angel funding from four investors, including two of its existing investors Sunish Sharma and Jayendra Shah.

While the social media space has matured a lot in the last couple of years, we are far from claiming any kind of established norms or proven best practices in the use of social media.

So the experiment continues.

And some are getting it better than others.

Let's examine the fundamentals of social media ownership, if at all, there is any relevance to a word of that kind.

If you are a brand, and you run a Facebook page, who "owns" that page? I presume, you can say, you, the brand, own it. And if you own it, you decide what kind of content goes up and what doesn't. But does that mean, you disallow content that can be damaging to you? For example, complaints, etc.?

Different brands have different sensitivities on these matters.

Many brands are concerned enough to not allow such mentions at all. They want to delete them all.

Some permit a little negative, but as soon as competition or a strong negativism comes in, they want to pull it out.

And there are but a few who believe that the medium is truly open, and all content should be allowed to be up there, and responded to.

This is where brands are concerned and where there is a genuine ownership of the brand at one level.

What if the social media presence is of a community or a group or a society? Should it be far more liberal, at least to its members? Should it have a character or a bulletin board with very loose moderation?

This idea was taken to a very different level by one account. In fact, I would term it as one of the bravest and most interesting social media experiments!

This is the official Twitter account of the country, Sweden. The Twitter handle is @sweden.

The 'owners' of the account, the tourism board of Sweden, term this as "the world's most democratic Twitter account". What that actually means, is that the Twitter account @sweden is actually managed by a different, average Swedish citizen, each week!

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