In my post Is ROI Overrated?, I advised against getting caught up in planning paralysis when it comes to social media
If you have just started to contemplate a social media strategy, you may well be part of a big company.
Perhaps it has become a political football of sorts. Some wonder where on the organizational chart social media should belong. Who should “own” the social media effort? The communications department would seem to be an obvious home for it. Then again, social media involves technology, so shouldn’t IT have a say too?
If you have been charged with trying to help your organization get its collective arms around social media, I advise a word or two of caution that might seem at odds with my earlier post, but really isn’t.
This advice is based on my experiences with social media and my long history helping companies adopt and implement technologies, including marketing systems and what could arguably be called the first social media platform, Lotus Notes. Before I got into PR I cut my tech teeth on IT consulting.
The caution can help you avoid having a great big target painted on your back that could arise from social media not being well understood. Political footballs and investments come with risk.
Even when it is understood social media can be amorphous. Like a Rorschach test, people see different things in it based on their perch in the organization and might have divergent expectations, as examples:
C Suite: We must do it now! Everyone’s on Twitter! The CEO at X company has a blog! Where are we?
Legal team: What about the risks?
Marketing: Great! One more place to plaster our messages!
Everyone else: Don’t bother me with this now, I already have too much on my plate.
Without taking this into account, and setting the right expectations, you could wind up at the center of an effort doomed to failure because it was not properly conceived, budgeted and implemented.
So how do you reconcile my advice to not get caught up in planning paralysis with these words that urge you to go forward in some kind of methodical and rational way?
Stay tuned for my next post, I will share some practical tips.
