May has been a crazy month and hopefully normal blogging service will resume shortly.
But in the meantime I was thinking about some work we have been doing with one of our clients over the past month – seeking out views on how social media (and the wider social web) affects business and more specifically corporate communication.
One of the key questions that saw significant debate was whether organisations are in a position to trust their employees – both communications/PR staff and non-communications/PR staff – to become online advocates and de facto communicators for the business.
The discussion was varied and swung between those who argued that employees are effectively communicating about their employer all the time anyway so why not support that; and those that adhered to the traditional notion of channelling all the company’s news and communications through professional communicators.
The interesting thing for me is that the opposing views didn’t follow a divide between comms and non-comms staff. It seems that the main differentiator between those that ‘get it’ and those that don’t is dependent on a much wider mindset; perhaps between those that recognise the importance of authenticity in business and those that like a more traditional controlled approach.
This got me thinking: some of the best ‘communicators’ or ‘communications advisers’ in a socially connected online world are not corporate communicators, but those that can be considered more ‘natural communicators’.
And maybe that is where we are going wrong with social media strategy and programmes – we try to teach corporate communicators how to communicate naturally – that is authentically – which doesn’t necessarily come easy. An analogy might be trying to teach a senior civil servant to write poetry.
Instead of focussing our effort on converting people in roles that are traditionally siloed, should we – as PR consultants - instead be tasked with identifying an organisation’s natural communicators and empowering them (or helping their employer empower them) to speak authentically on their employer’s behalf.
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