Why Do So Many Companies Hide Their Social Media Involvement?

While thousands of companies have either experimental or well-established presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites, those communities remain invisible on all but a tiny fraction of company homepages.

Why do companies hide their social media efforts from visitors?

My guess is that their reasons include
o fear that they'll lose control of their brand if too many people know they can have a say;
o lack of cooperation between marketing and IT;
o and perhaps pressure from lawyers who are nervous about new-fangled new media.

It's hard to find a company website whose homepage easily and clearly allows visitors to see all of the its social media initiatives. You'd have to be Nancy Drew to find the company blog on most websites, or its Facebook page, or all of its YouTube videos.

Starbucks new homepage, recently re-designed, stands head and shoulders above the rest for clarity, ease of use and organization. Clean and clear, it has a community heading above the fold, and clearly lists Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, among other links.

A few companies try to curate their content effectively, including:
o Dell tries, although you have to click into Community to find them on Twitter, Facebook, and so on;
o HP (although Connect with Others is a more than a little bit vague IMO).
o Zappos, whose CEO was a Twitter pioneer, has absolutely no indication of its community features on its homepage, although its new Zeta site, now in beta, includes an area about the company culture that will lead you to company blogs. But you still have to look hard to find it.
o On Walmart's site you have to scroll to the bottom of the homepage, and there's something called Connect and Share, which leads you, via the headline "Connect with other customers like you" (whatever that means,) eventually, to the company blogs, etc.

The more things change....
Back in 2006, i wondered why companies were hiding their blogs. Most still don't feature them prominently on the homepage, and I think the reasons are still the same:

"Literally thousands of CEOs, marketing officers, analysts, engineers and other corporate employees are blogging. Yet you'll be hard-pressed to find most corporate blogs through the company web sites. My guess is that lawyers or PR departments are a more than a little nervous about this whole new media, "listen to your customers" thing, so they said "Well, ok, we can try it, but don't make the damn blog too easy to find."

"... that is one way to avoid having to face critical comments on your blog!"

A really good yet no much talked about question has been put up in this post thanks for sharing, all the hype created over social media in the past 2 years specifically has not been presented on the main functional channels of most of the brands no matter what they are upto in the real world of social media.But they are for sure loosing some people everyday if they don't appreciate there social efforts on their websites.

Isn't it sad that these silos in corporate still exist? Personally, I love when a brand that I use/support prominently features social media involvement. I am quick to connect and share with others. Imagine that, social media as a vehicle for engaging your target audience!

Great question, BL. I actually have another theory: Many companies don't realize they SHOULD integrate their social efforts onto their corporate sites.

With so much focus on the spokes (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), many companies have lost sight of the hub. We need look no further Seth Godin's recent Squidoo brand-hijack or Google's SideWiki to see how web giants are holding brands at the mercy of the distributed web.

Jeremiah Owyang has made strong arguments for brands aggregating the social commentary about themselves on THEIR corporate websites. I like the concept, but with so much buzz about how much time consumers spend on social networks, it's easy to see why brands are focused elsewhere.

I've gotta agree with the above comments. I find this with many of my clients where they don't want certain aspects of the SEO strategy we put together for them, most are happy for twitter, facebook etc but some seem scared to participate in the area of social media. The reason is usually to do with the control of the discussions and concern that there may be negative content distributed about them.

Scott - one of the big reasons companies don't know they SHOULD integrate social media into their marketing is that they get bad advice from their agencies and self-appointed social media gurus.

Social media is a great way to drive traffic to a brand, so why make them take a long trip to get there. :>)

Amelia - Consistent negative feedback is usually a clue that something needs to change.

I think the reason social media is not integrated with the main corporate website is simple incompetence.

Corporate websites do many things wrong. It's only natural that they would forget to have links to all their other sites, Twitter, YouTube channel, blog, etc. They're inept.

Corporate websites should include embedded videos of current and classic commercials, with HTML code to enable people to embed the commercials in their own blogs, especially if the commercial is funny or innovative.

I wanted to show my blog and Twitter fans how the current Ditech Refi Sales tv commercials are almost identical to the Twitter graphics, the bird, the blue color. But this new commercial is not on YouTube or the Ditech corporate site.

These companies are just plain clueless.