Setting the social media agenda where one doesn’t exist

Last week, I was having dinner with some friends who were discussing their frustration with being in organizations where it felt as though there was no true agenda in regards to their web presence. While these folks are quite good at what they do, neither of them felt particularly strategic in their thinking and it wasn’t part of the job they felt they were taking. I told them they needed to reconsider that the thought that their only job was execution, but rather, being an asset required taking a more strategic view of things.

The conversation fired me up enough, that I had to put on my teaching strategist hat in-between bites of gluten free pizza.

Here were some of the takeaways:

1. You need to be the subject matter expert: Maybe you feel as though you’re good at specific things and feel out of your realm when it comes to trying to provide a senior leader direction on a topic. That’s understandable. But the reason you’re there is often to be the “young, fresh mind” offering up key insights and information that will help the organization move forward in its marketing digitally. In the case of these two folks, they’re working for non-profits with limited budgets, but that’s not a unique thing. Which leads me to…

2. See what others are doing well: There are so many resources online that you can spend entire days — to your peril — researching discovering and voraciously reading the pros, cons and so forth of what other people on doing online. The bottom line here is you can find people in your field and around it, doing things that can be of benefit to your organization. It doesn’t mean doing the same things, it means figuring out what’s working and what doesn’t, so you can provide a value-added benefit to the organization.

3. Assess your goals by listening and asking questions: For my shy friends who flourish designing, this one seemed the hardest. “What if I say something stupid? I mean, what if they ignore what I have to say?” Understandable fears, but you never know until you try. And the tactics involved in converting people to a new way of thinking often require showing rather than telling. It can be tempting to want to inundate folks with the bevy of new things that may or may not help. (And don’t get me started on the calls from consultants offering to change your life with this product or that one…) But it’s your responsibility to curate the best ideas, implement what you can within your responsibility and be able to show how it’s helping.

4. What’s the punchline?: Often times, it just boils down to giving someone the punchline. In organizations where people are wearing lots of hats, with leadership who might be set in a different way of doing things (read: older), it might be challenging to convince them to really propel forward with bold new innovations for fear they won’t work as well as conventional methods. That’s where it’s your responsibility to track, measure and evaluate what’s working and what doesn’t. Make sure that everything you’re doing can be tied by to goals that you established, so there’s no confusion about what time is being spent on.

Time will tell whether this recommendations from this spirited discussion — ok, spirited from my end — will necessarily help, but they’re both reported feeling more confident since our little impromptu lesson.

Why are web people based in-house?

That might seem like a “Doh!” question for those of us who work in the field or who come in contact with web folks in our day-to-day educational lives. But I had a friend ask me this today. “Well, if it’s just web work, why do you all need to be there at all? Can’t you just work remotely?”

So much of what we do is about relationships. A good web professional is bringing two things to the table in an institutional environment that’s invaluable — perspective and expertise. Knowing the technical aspects of their job to the depth and ability necessarily for where they are, is something of a given. (Or at least, should be.) Having someone at the table who can provide a lifeline for navigating the velocity of media is necessary.

It’s less about the technical side and more about strategy and marketing. It’s one thing to have a strong technical infrastructure and team handling things, but having people supervised by marketers and others who often have a background steeped in print and old media can leave a gap. Lots of institutions have become proactive about filling it, but the more technology grows in our lives, the more places we have a need for it. So where before it was only about having a web site, now it’s about a social media presence.

So I told my friend, that it’s less about the backend of things. It’s important to have someone on a team who’s experienced with these matters, to be sure. Yet, a decade into this “new world” of web and marketing and we’re still explaining these roles in very old school ways. It hasn’t caught on to a wider audience yet, because the need for marketing and strategy outside of the business world doesn’t seem as necessary a component. But it ignores the communications piece of the puzzle. When we peel it all back, that’s all we’re doing anyway. I’m fond of telling people that so much of what we do online is the same sorts of conversations we’ve always had, we’re just using different tools to carry them out and now we have a wider pool of folks from which we’re conversing.

We’re conductors for an orchestra of different voices. I’m doubting that ‘web conductor’ will be a new job title anytime soon, though.