Quick and friendly piece of advice NBC. You and anyone else creating Twitter accounts that don’t do anything will likely see problems down the road.

Creating URLs simply to have links is a no no. Do you have something to distribute with this?

If you do have stuff, then Twitter away. If not, you are being shortsighted.

Unused social profiles and pages are just a new way of saying “reciprocal links”,”link schemes” and “bad neighborhoods”.

Valueless pages are valueless pages.

They are also spam indicators and can negatively affect your rankings. Understand those Google guidelines!

Hopefully NBC will back their Twitter pages with valuable content, and I bet they will (they are pretty savvy over there). If they do I would congratulate them and Twitter both. Here is the The Office on Twitter.

Can Twitter can become a defacto mobile rss for large properties like NBC?

I bet Twitter would like that.

In any case, it is important to remember that a social media campaign is more than a link on a social site. Creating social pages and not doing anything with them won’t just get you in trouble by search engines, but (vastly more importantly) it will also give you a bad name with the people you are trying to interact with.

Social media campaigns, particularly for media content providers, need to have a few things in order to work.

One: Have a plan of action.

Two: Interact with or actually use the social site.

Three: Get your content out there. Let the people know. (This step is worthless, and in fact damaging, if you are not doing step number one.)

Oh and NBC, don’t get mad at me, your Office Twitter page has doubled it’s followers since I wrote this article

Update: Warren commented below and and highlighted his article, which is excellent and goes a bit deeper than I did by providing examples of companies using Twitter well, in addition to those who are not.

In defense of Kenneth Li’s coverage of the 56th annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference (media giants bitch about the search industry), there really was not much to cover…

Let me save you the time of reading a unenlightening article that is irritatingly split into three pages.

Summary of article

Media bigshots – “wah, boo hoo, sniffle”

Search industry – not represented.

There is nothing new or interesting in this article except the barely interesting quote from News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin.

“The amount of money we get from those (Internet companies) are a fraction of those we get from the cable industry,” he said. “We have to be careful not to disaggregate.”

Yeah, maybe that is because you are suing the future by suing Google.

Everyone who writes about this will mention the “Custard” / “Sioux” reference, but the more interesting point to me is that media moguls can’t seem to leverage the internet for anything more than a “fraction” of what they get out of cable.

If you must read the article for yourself, here you go…

Old media turns combative against new media