I had to think long and hard before asking Jeremiah Owyang to include me in his “List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008” post.
Although it’s always nice to see your name in print, and I am proud of my role at Adobe, I have a fundamental disagreement with Jeremiah’s suggestion that social media needs to have a senior strategist in the command chain of an enterprise in order to properly embrace this new challenge. This echoes some of the discussion I’ve seen on other marketing and social media blogs and even on Twitter about “who owns social media” and how to bring social media into the enterprise.
From where I sit, that sounds like an attempt to graft typical command and control structure onto something that should be far more organic and integrated into a company’s existing systems. And frankly, an awful lot of what’s being said out there is starting to sound like a load of self-referential justification and/or an attempt to sell one’s own particular products and services. I’d go so far as to say that if your company needs to create an actual person or group who “owns” social media, you’re screwed before you even start.
Social media is not a silo. It’s not even all that new. People have been having conversations on the Internet since the Internet got started. The only problem is that it’s taking time for businesses and people that are used to the old methods of mass communication to truly understand the fact that things work a little differently here.
I’m biased, of course, but I think Adobe is doing a pretty decent job of navigating these waters. Some groups are adapting faster or more thoroughly than others, of course, but we’ve got people throughout the company blogging, Twittering, making videos, interacting on Facebook, and generally getting with the post-Cluetrain approach to communication. And I believe we will continue to move in the right direction.
Getting back to my original point, though, I had to think about what the implications were of putting myself on a list even though I don’t necessarily agree with the underlying premise. Obviously, I opted to be listed, since aside from the issue of “ownership” I fit the role as Jeremiah listed it, but I’m also putting up this post as a counterbalance.
Actually, we agree, see below:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/03/18/trends-corporate-adoption-of-social-media-tire-tower-and-the-wheel/
Also, in my post that you linked to, I wrote the following:
“It’s important to note, that in the end, these skills (the ability to communicate online) will disperse and grow to many employees. Generation Y comes to us with these abilities built it as a “digital natives”– yet the need to organize will still occur, it’s a knee jerk reaction to every corporation.”
Ugh, I hit send too quickly, here’s a few other posts, that indicate the communications happen at the edge of the company.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/06/19/social-media-faq-6-who-owns-the-social-media-program/
http://tinyurl.com/ysqpsp
To summarize, I do also agree that the communications will disperse to the edges of the company, but regardless of it occuring organically, corporations tend to react with roles, processes, and well, control.
LUX EDIT: I shortened one of the URLs to keep from breaking the layout.
Well, I can only speak to what I see happening at my company, and to my own beliefs on the issue. And what I see is a healthy evolution, and an integration of social media tactics into existing groups and communication methods. I feel that is a far superior method than the imposition of artificial, top-down process, or worse, outsourcing social media to an external agency.
Good points. In now way was my post suggesting that things be top down (my posts indicated the the ‘edges’ are where success is)
My point is that corporations are finally allocating real resources –this is for real, not a skunkworks project.