Last month I wrote a post about the common strategic mix up by organizations who don't understand that the two great strategies of social media, content and conversation, take different priorities depending on the tools you use.
When you choose social media tools like blogs, podcasts, online video, etc., you should lead with content and conversation is secondary. When you choose a social networking tool like Facebook or Ning, you should lead with conversation and content is secondary. Though it's probably still too early in the game to say there are "laws" of social media/new media marketing, these seem to hold true.
Last week I found a great example of this. According to a NewTeeVee post, CBS is changing its strategy for TV.com away from an online community with videos, to one that is focused on the video content itself like Hulu and Fancast have done. Apparently when TV.com was created, the focus wasn't on content. TV.com was focused on conversation for a community. The problem with that strategy, however, was that people were a lot more interested in the videos themselves than conversations about the videos. TV.com was (and still is) an online video site. Online video is a social media platform, not a social networking platform, so content should be the leading strategy. Ultimately, the people using the site proved this point and CBS has appropriately changed course.
The good news for CBS is that they should be able to make the switch successfully because they have content people want. The bad news is they're now playing catch up to Hulu because of this strategic mistake.
Don't make the same mistake TV.com did. Lead with content when you use social media and lead with conversation when you use social networking.