Would you trust a social media intern to restructure your business?
Listening is great and so is engaging with conversation. One of the key questions for me that came up in Social Media Monitoring Paris was that of what happens next. Many businesses need to refocus and restructure to deliver for their customers, that are a key development that comes from social media. To delight customers and reduce negative feedback many companies need to make fundamental changes. But as Brian Solis admitted this puts social media at the vanguard of company restructuring and change. Giles Palmer CEO of Brandwatch raised the question, if it is your social media intern heading up social media, is it them in charge of change management? Brian Solis is great at social media and certainly not an intern but is he best qualified to head up your change management in your company? Maybe he is if he known what the company needs and where it should be going.
Should social media companies compete with change management accountant practices? Is this the future of social media agencies in 2011?
4 comments on “Would you trust a social media intern to restructure your business”
sometimes they can also become our business partner … depending on the needs of business. thanks
Social media has become very valuable to any company. The ROI in scoial media is huge since most of the social media sites don’t cost money. Consumers want them, and it’s a new indrustry so I think a intern is better than nothing. But more and more pros are coming.
Well I certainly don’t know about allowing a social media intern to restructure my entire company but I’d certainly have faith in social media experts because they are around the web all day and are able to quickly exchange and come up with new ideas that are fast-paced and engaging. I’m sure that a social media intern could play a crucial role in the advancing of a business though.
Hi Murray,
you make some good points here – but surely it takes more than just the people running the social marketing programs (if that is how it is set up in a company) to lead or make all the changes needed to reduce problems and respond to negative feedback. The feedback then needs to be passed on to whoever in the business is responsible for that issue and related systemic causes of the issue.
I think the most critical element in the area you raise is to ensure than the social media marketing programs are taken seriously within the business and are directly sponsored and reporting to the ultimate god in the business – preferably the CEO.
If others know that feedback and suggestions coming from social sources are taken seriously at the top, then it has a chance to succeed – irrespective of the junior intern status of the worker bees doing the social buzzing.
But if the social stuff is seen by senior management as an experiment that could fail, a joke waiting for laughter and/or a waste of time of the people involved, then such an attitude will prevail and quickly spread thru the company.
So, it’s not about the hierarchical or experience status of the social marketers and others involved. It’s about the importance and status of these activities within the business and the corporate will and desire to help fix the issues they learned through social media conversations.
Organizations need to realize that any employee having a conversation with a past, current or future customer is engaging in a moment of truth that could end positively or negatively. Ultimately businesses succeed or fail on how they handle each one of these moments of truth.
Even one negative moment of truth handled badly can cause a business to explode.
Cheers
Richard Keeves
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