I don’t have many rules when I sit down to decide what to write here on my little slice of the internets, but one I try to stick to is “Avoid reactive post structure.”. You won’t see me writing about the Facebook/Nestle thing, Motrin Moms, or Skittles.com for two very good reasons:

• The attention span of the internet is infinitesimal. Chances are, at least one of those three things mentioned will be completely forgotten about in a year. The lessons will have been learned, or not. The coverage will have been covered.
• For me, talking about an event as the main focus of a blog is backwards. It puts the focus on the event, rather than the point of view, and makes the learning that much less “portable”.

Chances are, the lessons learned from Nestle and Facebook are much broader than “don’t respond to people on Facebook with corporate lingo”, but when the entire position is framed within the Nestle example, it becomes more of a challenge for people to apply it to their own situation, be it personal or professional, and therefore becomes less valuable to someone reading it a month, 6 months, 6 years from now.

Why not structure a post to make it about responding to people’s concerns about you with compassion and being useful in your response, using Nestle as a historical example, rather than “Boy, Nestle sure screwed up this time! Just look at what they did on Facebook!”

The lessons we are learning now while these new tech implementations of humanizing concepts are in their infancy deserve to be recorded. The thinkers and people who are passionate about it should all have a voice. But let’s document the times in a way that will resonate into the future, and not be left as a one-off relic of the times.

This is what makes content evergreen, rather than ‘news’.

What say you? Am I nitpicking?

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• Nestle: Even Giants Are Afraid of Social Media! (thoughtpick.com)
• What Other Companies Can Learn from Nestle’s Facebook Page (labnol.org)
• Speaking like a human isn’t quite enough (hyperorg.com)
• Learn Social Media by Example: Skittles Steals the Social Media Rainbow (thoughtpick.com)
• There’s nothing inherently useful about being an early adopter. (jeremymeyers.com)

Jeremy Meyers is an Engagement Strategist at Waggener Edstrom and blogs at JeremyMeyers.com