1) Social media is an outlet for a real substantive site. Many companies try to build the social media without that backbone.

2) Delivery methods/social networks are varied and change often. Again, this is another reason for a strong central site or brand to rotate the social media strategies. If your online strategy is to twitter or myspace rather than building your own content and that site dies or dwindles in influence, what do you have left? Social media is part two. It should always be after your own inner-site development.

3)The term “social media expert/strategist” is so over-used now that many companies hire poor people to execute. Companies don’t know what to do and are getting sales/PR people who know how to talk the game but don’t perform the real content development to integrate with their strategy. Sadly, there just aren’t standards for who can really execute social media strategies.

Too many companies just throw up social media without having anything good to back it up with. It’s ridiculous.

Because of TB’s reputation for “media management” anyone who genuinely posted any concern would have been instantly under suspicion as just being a hired stooge.

I imagine it was also the target of a lot of trolls who used it as a vehicle for expressing their resentment.

Although I’m only guessing about what happened as I have no acual evidence of what happened, I suppose I’ve come up with a few suggestions as to how social media in the workplace needs to be managed – the reputation for listening and acting on workforce suggestions needs to be in place before any kind of mega launch of a “we’re listening to you!” facility even starts, as that reputation can kill the social-media strategy stone dead.

Which is kind of auto-causative…

It died a very sudden death. Nothing happened. No-one used it. It may even still be up there in the interweb.