Social Media Use: Not For Everyone

2009 May 14
tags: , ,
by Michael Leis

In the insular world of folks that use and consult on Social Media (like me) it’s easy to lose sight of how advanced and challenging it really is for people to create content through these channels.

This reality is hitting me lately as I have been a big advocate of the people within organizations using social media channels on behalf of the brand, and ostensibly providing the brand with its own network. Initially, it’s easy to think that the corporate culture is at fault. And to a certain extent, it is: the culture inside corporations creates habits in daily tasks that are hard to change.

But when the brand is willing to put people inside these channels, the equation changes. You have to look at the propensity of these individuals to want to engage in the channels, and do so in a way that doesn’t eat away at the bottom line. Today’s social media landscape, especially for brands with followings within them, can look like a million tin cans on strings: each platform with its own preferred communication tools, styles, frequency, and so on.

For this generation of senior employees and the brands they represent, it becomes very important to understand where the personal comfort level is, and work with that, as opposed to trying to ramp up everyone to where you think they should be. This is where the community manager becomes crucial.

So much of social media today is trial and error that businesses need to dedicate the community manager to soak up all the R&D in this area. Having people who are generally uncomfortable putting themselves out there trying on social networks, even where they’re a good fit, can be a hideous time-suck that doesn’t help anyone.

Instead, use that community manager as the brand’s beat reporter: making regular time to talk with employees who’s insights are valuable to the audience, and then communicate those ideas on their behalf through the brand presence in different channels. This method has a number of advantages:

  1. Employees can see how they appear differently in different networks: a MySpace blog post looks and feels way different than the company blog, or a comment thread in Facebook.
  2. It starts to carve out social media time in their day: instead of spending time having an existential crisis over how to respond or write, you’re using that time constructively. Eventually, if they’re ready to jump in, they will have a time to engage in social media that feels right as a part of their routine.
  3. Providing fresh insight on their talent: many times, people don’t know what they know. By having the community manager filter that personal value through their perspective to the audience, those employees will gain new confidence from the process and publication. It can be reinvigorating.

What it ends up coming down to is this: to start social media successfully, internally, think of it as marketing the people in your company more than anything. Pushing people full-throttle into a series of emerging channels can be disastrous. But having one engaged advocate lower the barriers to entry.

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Related posts:

  1. The Brand Cause: Focusing Social Media Strategy
  2. The recession: your pivot into successful social media
  3. The Three Colorful Circles of Social Media Strategy

from → Interactive Business, Interactive Marketing, Social Media

  • Hey Michael,

    I posted this on LinkedIn as well. You are so right about the propensity. At the end of the day this is social media and employees who are going to participate should actually enjoy throwing themselves into the middle of conversation.

    The concept of a brand beat reporter is a great one. Another role for those who dont like to act, might be to listen and synthesize the conversations down to the key trends and sentiment.

    Check out this post I wrote on organization 2.0, http://dirkshaw.blogspot.com/2008/08/organizati...

    good stuff as always..
  • It comes as no surprise that you're a good nine months ahead of me :) And thank you for taking the time to contribute that post, as well as your comment in the linkedIn group.

    Your insights about grounding decisions in the bottom line, along with the survey and interview work helped clarify this strategy to begin with a kind of "people marketing" to help further develop and identify social media channels, and internal roles, is a tremendous asset.
  • I've been dealing with some of these very same issues with a few clients who are ankle-deep in the social media pool, and was struggling to put thoughts to words. You hit it right square on the head. Great insightful post, really crystallized this together for me - thank you for sharing!
  • Glad it helped! It's actually been a struggle for me coming to this conclusion as well, which is why I needed to write it. I had been on a trajectory with engagements where we have designated a core of employees who are all aligned on brand, using social media to a certain degree personally.

    But the bottom line is the bottom line. The testing we're doing in the channels along with surveys isn't showing that people want it, and at this point in time, it's difficult to really express yourself efficiently and effectively without a decent amount of writing and design skill.

    That being said, making the people and their personalities a part of the marketing mix is powerful and important. And knowing this before an entire department's worth of people go diving into deep waters and ineffectively draining hundreds of man-hours is valuable.
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