A joyous moment has come — the idea that you need a director of social media is beginning to lose its myth status. For me, it says that maybe in 2013 some businesses may stop obsessing about how to centralize “social,” and instead just get the work done.
Companies with social media directors have a problem. Mostly, they just don’t get it. Or worse, they do get it but to decentralize the corporate, top-down structure would actually disrupt the business and force some change.
So here are 10 wishes for the enterprise that thinks they still need one person to organize the company’s tweets, check-ins or whatever. This is by no means a final list.
- Start talking to each other – who cares how you do it.
- Build projects, not echo chambers: Start building new ways for everyone to participate. Don’t worry about it being social. You’ll figure it out.
- Reconsider the generic social network. Don’t ditch it but instead make social transparent in your product development app or whatever you use to get things done.
- Make blogging a core way for how the company communicates to each other and the world. You will never need a social media director if a lot of people are blogging. People who write are forced to think. That’s a good thing. It’s actually nutritious for the mind.
- Narrate your work. Start teaching people how to tell stories about the way they work day-to-day. Help them share it.
- Give developers more freedom to make things. They will do far more for the company than one social media director can ever do.
- Design for Failure. This is a concept popular in the DevOps movement. It can apply to the entire organization. Treat the company like it is an experiment. Expect failure and design accordingly.
- Teach people how to use data. How to collect it, how to use the tools to analyze it and how to act on it.
- Rethink what websites get blocked inside the corporate walls. Open up a bit.
- Finally: cloud accountability. There are lots of ways now to make sure that costs are kept in check so you can justify all those new efforts that come when you do fire that director of social media.
Bonus: Have some fun next year. I mean, hell, watch more YouTube for goodness sake.