Information Squid

So many executives are scared of stepping into social media – they’ll lose control of their company’s image, they need to route all comments through Legal, they’ll see a giant drop in productivity if they stop blocking Facebook on the corporate network. What they’re really saying is “I don’t trust our ability to hire the right people.”

Every time I give a talk about social media, someone in the audience says, “How can I convince my manager to let me use this stuff? She thinks I’ll get the company in trouble.” The answer I use, and the one I’ve heard others use, is “Well, does she trust you to use the telephone?” Invariably gets a laugh, as well as people nodding and taking notes.

You can create problems for your organization pretty easily, whether with a recorded customer service conversation, a forwarded email, or an update on Twitter. The solution isn’t to restrict the channels the organization uses to communicate, it’s to hire people with good judgment and provide communication guidelines. Good judgment shouldn’t be a special requirement just for spokespeople.

This is why I worry about the Pizza Hut Twintern. Sure, she’s great PR (NYTimes on the job posting, Slate’s The Big Money on her experience). But Alexa Robinson is one person, new to the company, out there at the sharp end of the stick. Pizza Hut could disavow her as the traditional “low-level staffer,” so she can’t build trust in the brand the way a broader-based presence could.

Centralizing an organization’s social media efforts in one person, however awesome (and carefully vetted) they may be, isn’t the right answer. Give a real picture of your work: look at the IBMers’ blogs list or at Zappos’s Twitter aggregator, for example. Your staff are your organization. Hire with that in mind, and trust the people building your organization to represent it as well.

My recap from BlogPotomac is now up on the company blog.

The short version:

1. Shel Holtz: I don’t know how you establish a long-term community around a movie.
2. Shireen Mitchell: Watching on TV is different from being there in person, and social media can fill some (but not all) of the gaps.
3. Shireen Mitchell: The way Congress responds to advocates who use social media will determine how it’s used.
4. Scott Monty: Your network is a social media monitoring tool.
5. Scott Monty: Social media can serve different purposes for different departments and in different regions.
6. Liz Strauss: As soon as you’re hired, you’re no longer a customer: learn to listen.
7. Amber Naslund: Using company resources but only building your own brand means both the company and you suffer when you leave.
8. Scott Monty (yet again): Have a social media succession plan.
9. Shashi Bellamkonda: Reach out to other internal evangelists.
10. Doug Meacham: Invite your community to spend downtime with you.

Go read on Advocacy Avenue to find out what they all mean.

I was lucky enough this year to be able to attend parts of the Politics Online Conference, run by the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University. It was a great event, with interesting topics/speakers and impressively competent logistics (I helped stuff name badges into holders the Saturday before, and pretty much everything else was ready to move into the space then, banners and boxes and all).

If you want to read what I learned from speakers including Senator Claire McCaskill and Obama campaign Director of New Media Joe Rospars, my posts on Amplify’s Advocacy Avenue blog (oh yeah, we changed the blog name) are:

• POLC: How We Did It – the role of money in the Obama and McCain campaigns
• POLC: Reaching Congress, according to Congress and according to advocates
• POLC: The Visual Frontier
• POLC: Social Media Platforms and Directing Traffic to Your Real Campaign