Nokia Closes Its Official Livejournal Presence Tired of Russian Bloggers

We keep talking about how important it is for corporations to build social media presence everywhere they can and what advantages they should expect virtually immediately. But the problem is that sometimes the field of social media is simply beyond the control of people in the corporations - and the results can be unpredictable instead of positive.

Unfortunately sometimes even the most advanced and knowledgeable corporations make social media mistakes and demonstrate how miserable an action online can be if done wrong. The recent example is Nokia deciding to close its Russian-language community in LiveJournal.

Both brands - Nokia and LaviJournal - are widely popular here and I’d call both household brands that absolutely everyone knows and a large portion of the population uses. Nokia products are advertised heavily in Russia and the country is a huge market for the cell phone manufacturer with tons of loyal users.

So it is no wonder that Nokia is trying to speak to the users here actively exactly where the users are - and the users are mostly on LiveJournal which is the most popular blog platform here and the time waster of choice for many. LiveJournal communities (multi-author blogs) serve as a popular tool for companies and brands to engage people in discussion offering the functionality of submitting posts to everyone with enough rights to do so. And this is exactly what Nokia has decided to establish here as well.

But instead of relying on some internal social media specialists, Nokia has decided to contract a local gadget blog and its team that claimed professional knowledge of the target audience and the peculiarities of communications in LiveJournal. Quite a light style was also chosen for community moderation - any LiveJournal user could join the community and post to it but posts were moderated before actually appearing in the community.

But unfortunately for everyone (Nokia, the editorial team, and the overall corporate usage of social media) the community only existed for 25 days and was closed last week with the PR representative citing the fact that many bloggers used the community in a manner the company did not predict it could be used in. The decision is obviously based on the fact that the feedback the company received via the posts, comments, and emails happened to mismatch the ideal image of the feedback the company was supposed to receive through its deep involvement in social media.

As the reason of the failure many quote the fact that Nokia community was launched, managed and moderated by an external team and many subscribers accused the team of unprofessional behavior, including directly comparing Nokia products with competitors which was against the guidelines issued by the company. Also many users complained that after hiring independent experts to run the community, Nokia itself was not particularly active in the community and people only rarely heard official comments to questions when asked.

Another problem was that one of the local mobile market experts decided to launch a competing community around Nokia products (on LiveJournal as well, obviously) and quickly received more subscribers than the official community managed to draw in. In fact, that was not really difficult as the community had only 243 members and was subscribed to by 295 people only (many of them were at the same time community members).

Now that the decision to close the community has been made after numerous fights around it, the discussions in the blogosphere are still very active and all the participants keep accusing each other of unprofessionalism and childish behavior where Nokia wanted some real work on a platform the company did not know how to handle.

At that Nokia promises that this move will not mean an end of the overall presence of the company in the Russian internet segment: the plan is to continue building online presence of Nokia elsewhere. So instead of trying to manage a community of its own Nokia has decided to work actively in independent communities and blogs that are related to the company’s products.

To me this sounds like a reasonable decision given that the official community has never had enough time to grow enough to be noticeable and the corporation did not seem to take it seriously enough to deal with it properly. Also it looks like a good lesson to every company hoping to build some kind of social media presence: if you know how to do it right - go for it, but if your knowledge is limited and you can’t rely on experts with 100% proven reputation (and I doubt the fairly new world of social media has many such 100% proven experts), chances are you will face a failure and the investments in social media will lead nowhere.

Via (in Russian)