I recently participated in a symposium and one of the topics was the basics of social media, hosted by my colleague Heather Horsey. I was surprised at some of the questions:
- How do I get a hashtag? How much does it cost? How often can I use it?
- When I set-up our company Facebook page profile, everything the company does is updating on my personal wall and to my personal email, how can I delete that?
- Our company doesn’t want negative comments, is there anyway to choose the comments we want to post on Facebook?
- When I was tweeting on the Twitter, I didn’t see any results. How can you make sales on the Twitter if nobody is interested?
The intent behind the questions were genuine, but I quickly came to the realization that there is a massive education effort needed regarding social media in business. If we can assume that social media is now an essential function of any business, executives will treat it as a discipline that they must understand.
This will lead to educational opportunities, as companies cannot make strategic decisions without understanding social media. Executives will see social media as function that cannot be ignored. Companies will begin building internal social media teams and it will cross multiple business functions from customer service to employee recruiting. Any company not fluent in the language of social media will be at a significant disadvantage.
This is an opportunity for the marketing department to step up, take a leadership role in social media education and enhance its value to the entire organization.
Hopefully, we’ll never hear anybody ask about ‘tweeting on the twitter’ again.
Let us know if you think social media education will even extend to the C-suite, even if they never post, tweet or check-in. Share your thoughts here or on Facebook at Weise Communications and follow us on Twitter at @Weise_Ideas.
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