John McCrory

If you are exploring the world of social media and web 2.0 and thinking you just need to add some of these new channels to your bag of tricks, stop now and go back to what you were doing. Social media won’t help you.

Don’t get me wrong, the only way to understand how social media work is to learn by doing. As Jay Rosen says, “You gotta grok it before you can rock it.” So, you can start tweeting, create Facebook page and a LinkedIn group and start watching your follower, fan, and member counts rack up. It might make you feel better about yourself, and you will start catching on to how it all works. Just, don’t expect any of it to matter much.

Social media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 are far more than new communications channels. A collection of internet-based software tools and platforms that enable people to share and collaboratively manipulate information with each other, these technologies are part of the Internet’s ongoing disruption of the information ecosystem, a transformation now more than 20 years old.

I point this out not to sound like some kind of internet triumphalist, but to put social media in a proper context. Social media is not only transforming the transmission of information from point A to point B, it is transforming how we work with information.

The changes to the news business, marketing, buying and selling are just the tip of the iceberg. For organizations who are trying to figure out how or whether to use social media, this means the relevance of social media extends beyond the marketing department. Social media will be transforming every function within your organization, from facilities and maintenance to accounting, customer service, HR, and on and on. No one in the organization will be unaffected.

Playing with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like can be a lot of fun, and it can be a timesink. That’s okay — for a little while (see paragraph 2). We marketing and PR types have tended to be the early adopters of social media, but we have to look at social media as more than just marketing tools we can add to our existing programs.

The implications are significant for folks “inside the firewall” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Brito) who make the stategy, budget, and staffing decisions.

Are you willing to shred your budget? Kill sacred cows and start from scratch? Print thinner brochures and magazines. Send out direct mail fewer times a year. Stop advertising. You’ll have to find the money somewhere. A lot of social media are free in that they don’t cost money to use. But they do cost time and attention to do well. If you want to really make a dent in this new world, you’ll need to blow up your budget and start over.

This is not about new media destroying old media. Nor is it about social media replacing so-called traditional media. What’s emerging is an information ecosystem which is a hybrid of old and new. But, you can’t work effectively in that new ecosystem if you are organized to produce for the old one.

As new marketing strategies and plans are drawn up, the structure of the marketing department is going to have to change to execute those plans. You will need to upend your marketing communications staff. If you are going to succeed in the new world, you will need to reinvent your production process. The production requirements have changed. You will need to manage a different kind of media, on a different schedule, and that is going to require a completely new set of skills than your marcom department currently possesses.

It’s going to be painful. I know capable, wonderful people who have built up twenty or more years of experience and are still years from retirement whose strongest skills are just not relevant to the new needs marketing directors are going to have. Some are adapting, but many are not.

The InDesign expert who puts together your printed materials in-house may not be as valuable to the new campaign as the multimedia producer who can make podcasts and videos and zip them onto the internet. The new positions you’ll need to create on your staff will involve skillsets that current staff can’t easily be retrained for.

My point is that if you are, like most people in business, just dipping your toe in social media, or like some early adopters, have been working with it for two or four years or longer—at some point in the near future, you’re going to have to commit to some radical changes in staffing and budget. I think most of these changes will be a huge net positive, though not without some hurt. Are you up for it? Excited by it? Prepared to fight for it?

A lot of us talk up organizational change as a kind of tonic for business, but inertia is a powerful force in the workplace. A lot of the wariness of social media is in fact a result of the frustration of how hard it has been to foster cultural acceptance and embrace of earlier generations of promising technologies in the workplace. We’re very good at changing technology. We’re not very good at changing culture.

I hope this round of change will be different from the last. It will take a lot of commitment to fundamentally reorganize ourselves to actually get the most out of social media. You know who’ll show you how to do it? Your customers!