Article here.
I'm currently employed and likely won't be looking for a new position anytime soon, but one particular bullet in the article made me want to forward it to my company's leadership team:
3.) If you really want to understand social media, you must participate.
Really. You have to jump in. "In it to win it" as the article suggests.
I've personally participated in social media for a long time. I'd like to think that I'm pretty comfortable with connecting with others and getting my message "out there." And when I first started in my current position, I jumped right in to myriad social media channels. It was important to get our name out there, connect with supporters, connect with other similar organizations, etc.
And then my company put the brakes on. They wanted to know what my strategy was. What was I doing with this. They seemed to be scared by what they didn't quite understand. That's totally normal and I don't fault them for that. But then they asked for a strategy -- a detailed communications plan of what we hoped to do with our social media outlets.
I'll be honest: it's hard to say. I could set a goal of 250 Twitter followers by the end of the quarter...50 Facebook fans by the end of the year...1,000 YouTube views by next April. But there are so many moving parts to social media that throwing out those numbers would be meaningless. Our primary goals needs to be: PARTICIPATE. Jump in. Make some connections. See how our messaging resonates. When are we getting people excited? When are we hearing crickets? We can only learn and improve by participating first and we're doing ourselves a huge disservice by not participating until we nail down a detailed strategy...a strategy that could be completely outdated and useless by next month...or even next week!
I don't intend to become a Adobe expert. I'm not going to make a sudden career change and decide that I want to be a graphic or web designer. There are a million people out there who are much better at it than I am and always will be, regardless of the classes I take. However, as a communications professional, it's important for me to understand what works and what doesn't.
In the not-too-distant future, my company will completely redesign its website and I will manage the process and the vendors involved. With just my marketing and communications background, I would have been pretty limited in describing what I want to see, what I know can be done, anticipating our long-term needs, etc. With some of the classes I have taken and am currently taking (elements/foundations of digital design, text and image, technical writing, etc.) I will be in a much better position to effectively work with web/graphic designers, web/technical writers, photographers, etc. And even produce some of the work on my own!
I plan to continue mixing up theoretical and practical courses as the balance is giving me a really good handle on the whys and hows of new media in my current work environment.
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