Many companies are assigning the tasks of many individuals in disparate departments to one or maybe two people and/or handing “it” to a department and calling the task, “social media.” So who's job is it?
I am often asked who should be the person or the department to “do social media”?
Set the Wayback Machine to the year 2000. If someone walked into your company on a cold-call and asked to speak to the person in charge of “print,” you would direct them to the production department in charge of print purchasing. If they asked who was in charge of the communication systems, you would send them to the head of IT. Easy enough, these are communication mediums/tools.
If you were asked who is in charge of your tech support, customer service, editorial staff, sales and marketing, advertising and public relations you would know where to direct them. Again, easy — these people are the communicators and content contributors.
Today you might have someone walk in and ask, “Who is in charge of your social media”? This is akin to asking all of the above questions rolled up in one.
Apples and oranges — meet, gone bananas. At least that is how I see it. Many companies are assigning the tasks of many individuals in disparate departments to one or maybe two people and/or handing “it” to a department and calling the task, “social media.”
Just as you have trained your customer and tech support teams, anyone who speaks on behalf of your company or communicates with your customer — these individuals should be trained to also communicate and correspond via social media. Usually there are one or more individuals in a sales, marketing and communications department that write the copy for your print or web banner advertising, direct mail or email campaigns, public relations and sell your product. These individuals should also be trained to incorporate social media into their routine or at least be delegating the specific messaging to go out via social media as well as other established mediums and understand who, how and when to respond as part of an overall conversation.
The main differences in the medium of social media is that you shouldn’t use it purely for marketing, you need to add value and then the biggie — this medium talks back and in public. This is a whole new layer of communication and responsibility that does add more time and specific training to the current work flow. There’s no way around it. Anyone who says it doesn’t take much time or cost money hasn’t run a business.
With a few exceptions such as the technical aspects like writing code for iFrames for Facebook Pages and setting up a monitoring and reporting system, think of social media as another communication medium added to print, the phone and already established digital mediums.
As you already know, social media provides a platform to listen to and communicate with many, and in turn for that message to spread. Communicating within social media certainly adds a different twist and way of thinking, but it should be integrated into each area of your company and most importantly your overall strategy to met your business goals.
So do you wind up with a bowl of fruit and many people saying, “It’s not my job”? Perhaps, but I bet they are the same people who weren’t willing to learn how to properly use email or integrate contacts or leads into a digital workflow that helps make your company more efficient. There can often be a few sour grapes.
If you run a small business and do it all yourself, you should consider how to make time to add social media as another communications tool. Do it gradually and you will realize that it can become part of your routine. You might find that social media could eventually replace one of the mediums in your current toolset and open many more doors of opportunity. There have been many Swiss Army knives developed to help handle many aspects of posting and monitoring. Do be careful of some of these because you can begin to look like a spammer and not all monitoring tools will catch everything. Sometimes it is better to have one really efficient tool than many that you aren’t quite sure what they do.
A Sidebar Rant: Last year I attended a high-level (i.e. expensive) social media conference where an executive of a very large company told the eager-to-learn audience of a couple hundred people to hire interns that already know their way around Facebook to, “Do your social media.”
I have never been shy about being the only one to raise my hand and be a contrarian, so I did. I got up and stated, “That is like giving your company P/L over to someone who just learned Excel but doesn’t know anything about what is behind a formula or what it is linked to, how to operate a business, understand business goals and what is important to the bottom line. Social media networks are only communication mediums. And do you really want someone that doesn’t know anything about your product or business strategy speaking on your behalf”? I felt like Barney Fife feverishly screaming, “Citizen’s arrest, citizen’s arrest.” I got a lot of applause.
Sadly I still hear the intern approach. I firmly believe that it is better to teach the people who know your business how to use new tools rather than throw the baby out with the bath water. However that baby might be a better fit in another job if he/she is not willing to learn how to keep your business at the top of its game.
