And, macroeconomics aside, I think we’re talking about the company’s risk, right?

Big brands do have a bigger risk, in that social media could have a devastating effect on an established brand, but I think social media is more critical to get right for smaller businesses who don’t have the resources to recover from a mistake. If GM makes an SM mistake, we’ll all hear about it and they potentially lose millions of dollars but if a small business makes a mistake we might never hear about it or not give them the benefit of the doubt, which could be just as devastating. Like Terry said though, everything is relative.

As for the third question, I think quality is way more important than quantity in social media. If your message gets sent out to millions of eyeballs but no one acts on it then it’s basically null & void. But if your message gets sent out to ten thousand eyeballs and 20% of them click through to your blog/site/whathaveyou that’s a huge value to the brand.

I’m a PR measurement geek from way back (headed PR at Cognos for 7 years and was a big Delahaye client from the days before easy access to online analytics gave us a way to track a huge percentage of influence.) The point I wanted to make was that search is one more factor we need to measure when we are ranking influences.

And, yes, Stuart, I’m talking to you, in a perfect world, everyone should get a response or be dealt with appropriately but the reality is, you need to prioritize, especially when you are dealing with big numbers. Big companies have unbelievable numbers of touch points in social media and, as GM has poignantly proved, not unlimited budget. [Full disclosure, my brother is still a GM dealer, fingers crossed.]

Glad you enjoyed the panel, I thought it was a really good discussion. I had a feeling my comment about big brands having bigger risk might raise an eyebrow. I’m not at all trying to be dismissive of the risks and opportnities for start-ups in social media – I think they’re actually huge for both.

But having spent a lot of time working on both, I’ve found that big, established, multi-billion brands can usually be hurt more by mistakes in any marketing activity than they can be helped by success any one campaign. That’s why big brands are often more risk averse – there’s more at stake. Reputations that have been built up over decades, brands that are worth billions of dollars, thousands of employees, shareholders, partners that rely on the marketing and communications teams to make smart decisions and protect and enhance the brand.

That’s not to say that smaller brands don’t have risks, they absolutely do. It’s just that their sphere of influence is smaller, so there’s not as far to fall. Put simply – when start-up XYZ fails, it’s a big deal to their employees, customers, partners, local community, etc. If GM fails, it’s a big deal on a macro-economic scale.

I think your thought on how you evalutate who you need to respond to in social media is spot-on, and we’re actually saying the same thing. Social media provides the opportunity to actually see how wide their sphere of influence is. Click-throughs from search engines, link-backs to blogs and other forums that spur new discussions can all be measured and show how many people are reading, commenting and extending the discussion started by any one individual. The individual has huge power and the ability to reach influential audiences, but for an enterprise evaluating that influence, it still comes back to 1. How many people put eyeballs on the content and act on it; 2. Are those the ‘right people.’ And that’s a similar measure to how we evaluate traditional media.

What do you think? Agree, disagree?

Hope to cross paths again.