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Friday, March 28, 2008

The social media manager debate: Can’t we get the fundamentals right first?

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Steve Rubel and Jeremiah Owyang are at odds over the future of a job labeled, “Social Media Manager.” The job description of a social media manager revolves around the coordination of a company’s activities in the social media space.

Steve believes the job will be extinct in short order:

Who should “manage” these sites? Is it the social media specialist or someone in PR with specific vertical sector expertise who also gets digital? My strong feeling is that it’s the latter.

Owyang—who held a social media manager position with a previous employer—disagrees:

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and (for) the foreseeable (future), we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

It’s an interesting debate, but one that I believe misses a bigger picture. Jeremiah is right that full-time focus is required for some online communities. Even Southwest Airlines had to hire staff just to handle the moderation of comments to its blog, “Nuts About Southwest.” But Steve is also right that the day is coming when anybody engaged in communications will include online social skills in their toolkit, right along with good writing skills (the entry-level requirement).

Ultimately, though, whether engagement with people is online or off, social or traditional, one-way or multi-directional, multimedia or text, it all comes down to one thing:

Reputation.

I have heard calls for companies to create a C-suite position called “Chief Conversation Officer,” someone to manage the various online social channels that produce conversation. Again, that misses the point. What companies need is a Chief Reputation Officer to ensure all communication with core publics is coordinated in the company’s best interests.

This is not an original concept. Charles Fombrun, chief executive officer of The Reputation Institute and author of books like “Corporate Reputation,” has been proposing the job for years. To this position, through single- or double-solid-lines, would report anybody in the organization who engages with publics. The idea is not to make sure they all utter the same corporate jargon, but rather to make sure the company’s plans, strategies, values and actions are addressed honestly and consistently. A social media manager is a fine idea, but if he says, “Our product is shipping late because of manufacturing issues” while a media relations manager tells a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Our product is shipping late because we’ve had to redesign a part,” that inconsistency will spread through the cycle-less media space—online and off—like wildfire. Whether it’s conversation or a traditional press release, the communication channel must be used to communicate honest, transparent, accurate information.

Few organizations have anybody in a position like this. Even if there’s a senior-level public affairs person, Human Resources and employee communications often don’t report to him, and both communicate to vital publics (employees and prospective employees). Community relations often reports elsewhere, as does investor relations and government relations. And all those employees with their individual blogs? Who’s providing them with the resources they need to represent the company accurately and fairly?

Who ends up managing social media spaces is an interesting argument, but seems to me less important than making sure whoever does it is part of a network through which accurate and candid information is funneled. It’s time to look higher up and beyond the niche. We should get the basics right before worrying too much about the details.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Clinton’s Fact Hub a model for rapid business response to rumors and inaccuracies

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Business can take a lesson from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The presidential candidate has launched a new website called The Fact Hub, designed to provide an instant response to misrepresentations and misstatements of fact. According to an article in The New York Times, even Republican strategists are applauding the move:

Steve Schmidt, a former political strategist for President Bush who helped oversee his 2004 campaign war room, said the new Clinton site was “the next evolution in rapid response.”

The site is built on a blogging platform (but without comments), enabling quick responses to inaccurate media reports and statements by opposition candidates. It has already been used to debunk a rumor that Sen. Clinton failed to leave a tip at a restaurant, a story that was picked up by a variety of media.

If you’re an anti-Hillary person, please don’t post anti-Hillary comments here. (I’m not a Clinton supporter myself.) This post isn’t about Sen. Clinton but rather the use of social media tools as a channel for quickly addressing rumors and inaccuracies. Business would be well-served to look at this example and adopt it instead of relying on less effective channels like those stodgy corporate statements we’re so accustomed to issuing.

Hat tip to Carmen van Kerckhove for the heads-up.

Friday, November 02, 2007

Print vs. online: Don’t compare apples to apples

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I’m a big fan of print and a believer that old channels like print can adapt nicely when new channels come along. It follows that I’m usually pleased to see studies that reinforce the value of print. The new study from the Poynter Institute, however, doesn’t do much for me.

Touted over at the newly content-intensive Ragan.com site, the study is the latest in Poynter’s ”Eyetrack” research series. (The study isn’t new—results were reported back in March.) The study—which used eye-tracking lenses to see where the eye went on various kinds of print and online pages—found that people learned better when reading the print version of an article than the online version. These results were the same—print winning—regardless of the print format. Reading print also was more likely to drive readers to action.

My problem is with the online approach to the content, which appears to be a simple republishing of the article as written for print onto a web page. The study would have had more validity if the story had been repurposed to accommodate the Web’s strengths, such as interactivity and multimedia. In other words, Poynter compared apples to apples, when oranges would have been a more apt point of comparison. If anything, the study shows that articles need to be treated differently online than they are on paper.

Given that 75% of people read methodically when reading print (according to the study) but fully half scan online text, producing an article that took advantage of the ability to scan items you can click and activate short videos would have most likely produced a different result. I mean, anybody would have deduced that it’s easier to read a print article in print than it is online.

Also absent from the study was the social element of the online world, the ability to interact with others who have read the same article (through comments, rankings, and the like).

The Ragan write-up failed to note that more of the text was read online than in print—77% online, 62% in broadsheet format, and 57% in tabloid format. What’s more, nearly two-thirds of online readers read the entire story after they had selected a particular story to read.

Even more interesting is that study participants answered more questions correctly about the test article—regardless of whether it was read in print or online—when the article was presented in an “alternative manner”—that is, with no traditional narrative. It seems to me that online presentation offers more flexibility for this kind of presentation than print does.

I’ll keep promoting the benefits of print and I agree with Bill Sweeetland, the author of the Ragan piece, that companies are too quick to ditch their print communication vehicles, particularly as part of their internal communication efforts. But honestly, this study doesn’t help me make that case.

Here’s the Eyetrack 2007 video: