Social Media: Tending the Garden

I came across a great article today in Harvard Business about some of the less sexy sides of Social Media – the continual maintenance that you need to do such as ‘seeding’ and ‘weeding’ that are necessary if you want your social media engagement to flourish.

It is an important area and one that I talk to my clients about – who will be the designated social media champions internally? do they have time? what is the org. structure? who has what skillsets/interests and who is already dabbling in the space?

It reminds me of setting up and managing intranets years ago. Initially intranets were managed in either IT or Comms but over time to have fresh content and relevance you needed buy-in and resourcing from all areas – effectively a decentralised model – which today is the norm.

Social media strategies are starting to follow that shift. While they might be owned technically in marketing or by one division to have real relevance and cut through decentralising and building social media champions throughout the business is integral.  Not only will your maintenance activities be shared, you will get buy-in from the whole business and the benefits to the organisation will increase four-fold.