If your company is considering "getting into" social media, you might want to consider how to go about even having that discussion in the first place. There are many technologies and concepts that tend to get lumped together as "social media" - blogging, social networks, social bookmarking, microblogging, podcasting, photo and video sharing, microblogging, social media news releases, just to name a few of the most obvious ones.
There are some patterns in the way things tend to happen in organizations. They often involve meetings, Powerpoint presentations, strategic planning, tactical components, and a schedule for implementation. Nothing inherently wrong with any of this. However, the social media space has qualities that make it more challenging to simply break it down into action items to be delegated to the appropriate teams and individuals. And you maybe have to rethink what "action" means in this context.
In some respects the challenge is similar to the classic poem The Blind Men and the Elephant. Another useful illustration is this well-known quote from Stephen Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:
…envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They’re the producers, the problem solvers. They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out. The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies, and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders. The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, "Wrong jungle!
So the challenge is to make sure you’re in the right jungle. This brilliant video offers a fast-paced overview of the social media jungle.
Keep in mind is that social media is "social". If your organization, or key members of your team, are already socially active online you may have a leg up. All too often this isn’t the case however, so your action items might initially need to be what are often considered passive activities: listening and observing - and as you start gettting a feel for things you can start taking the next step: participate.
One of the best ways to do this is to seek out conversations that are already happening that are relevant to your business. Look at blogs, social networks, video and photo sharing sites, social bookmarking sites. Get a sense of what makes them "social" - and glean what you can about their etiquette and conventions.
As you start to get a feel for things you might want to stick your toe in the water and actually participate (if you haven’t intinctively started by this point). Make a few friends, answer some questions where you feel like you can add value. Set up a social bookmarking account and get a feel for how tagging and sharing works. Set up a news reader and start adding feeds from blogs that interest you. Look for photo-sharing groups that you might have something in common with and join them.
The list goes on and it can get insanely unmanageable if you get too carried away. The point of all of this is that maybe the action items for an organizational kick-off meeting on social media should be for everyone to agree to a discovery phase. Explore these spaces for a month with as little structure imposed as possible. To whatever degree it comes naturally members of the team might share their explorations as they go. Others might prefer to go off on their own. Both approaches can be valid. Then you reconvene and share your experiences in "finding the jungle." You’ll surely have a variety of experiences and opinions, but hopefully some insights will emerge that might reveal appropriate pathways of engagement for your organization.
If this seems a little too general or lacking in specific action items, it’s intentional. I’ve resisted the temptation to offer specific ideas, in part because some of those ideas deserve more thorough treatment in a separate post - but mostly because the intent here is to encourage some unstructured exploration and discovery before you start defining action items.
