“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
-Lao Tzu

So if social media is a perpetually moving target, as new platforms are developed and new functionality added to existing platforms, how do we set our sights on a goal? What if social media really were about the journey and not about the destination? Because truthfully, I don't think there is an end to this journey.

As users of public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, we've been trained on how to function in the sphere. We learned in our travels through the various mediums. Doing it for ourselves, most of us didn't have a goal, it was really was and still is about the experience. But now, we know how to listen, we know how to talk. We listen for our interests and we talk to people talking about things that interest us.

In a professional context, however, most employees experience fear. Many companies do not practice social communications. Being a part of the voice of a whole company... a company with a marketing and/or PR department is just plain scary. We seem to forget that there are lessons from our personal experience with various social mediums that we can take with us into this new context. Consider the lurker. (more on that later)

The segmented nature and lack of flow between cells in a company work together to create anxiety when CEOs and Marketing Directors think about social media. This removal control of the "message" of the on-going story being told about a brand gives folks in a position of responsibility for the brand pause, even as they get excited about the potential of the medium. From their hands the message is wrested and delivered into the hands of the consumers of their products and services. These are the people who truly control and steer the message in a social media sphere. Even if your company is neither talking nor listening, there's a good chance your consumers are. The reality is, it's always been about the users. In the social media sphere elaborately engineered messages tend to get ignored and authenticity becomes the modus operandi. And in large organizations with diverse product lines, that means there shouldn't be just one point of contact. Experts within your organization being given a voice - that's scary. And the really scary part of losing control is the social empowerment of people you've maybe never heard from within your company.

But there's a solution for that.

Next edition: The Center of Opportunity

photo by e3000