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Phil's Blogservations
Monday, September 10, 2007
Posted by philgomes 10:14 PM
Corporate Success In Social Media: Managing UpI know a fair number of students and junior PR folks read this blog, so I hope a number of you at least consider what I have to say here. (And I know that Paull is looking for material...)
I'm more convinced of this every day: A communications operation's success in social media (agency or corpcomm function of sufficient size and scope) will be increasingly reliant on the junior employee's ability to "manage up" and the senior practitioner's ability to listen.
Now, of course, training in terms of social media engagement — at all levels — is exceedingly important. (Real training, people. Not just forcing your employees to listen to the company's anointed expert yap from a Polycom phone and tell you how great all this nifty new stuff is.) In fact, the topic of training is what has consumed me since about June with the immersive training program I've helped build. (Now into our seventh session.)
That's perhaps a separate topic.
But any training is going to be fairly worthless if the trained employee doesn't learn how to "manage up."
Here's why...
The workforce is well into hiring the early generations of newly minted PR folks who acquired (or even grew up with) fairly good instincts about what is (un)acceptable behavior online.
Many (no, not all) senior-level folks nevertheless have not grown up in those online community environments or developed those instincts.
Compound this with the unfortunate tendency to conflate "PR" with "media relations" and its related tactics, and you get a situation where the senior level person says, "Jenny/Jason... Just go pitch those blogger people over there."
"And shit rolls downhill..."
Jenny/Jason likes his/her new job and is forced to act contrary to instinct. And there you have it: Since the younger workforce is not trained in school to manage up, you get the kind of stuff that quickly ends up in Bad Pitch Blog.
As the CEO of a former client once wrote in an executive Q&A questionnaire, "You've got to trust the person closest to the data."
Seriously... Shouldn't there be mandatory classes on the topic of simply working within a management structure?
Did any of you attend such classes? (Alas, I was too busy my first two years of undergrad attempting to decipher Ptolemy and translate the first book of John from ancient Greek.)
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This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.
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