I confess, I admit: I could never ever
coach an American Football team. I have never played it, never watched a
full game, I do not understand
any of the rules, and I am completely ignorant to all the
habits and sensitivities. I would probably do about as good as a drunken rhinoceros in
artistic skating.
In my book, to be good at
something requires
enthusiasm, sheer
will, track record and
hands-on experience. And that is exactly what I see as lacking in how most influencing agencies cope with social and digital media. They line up their
usual experienced heavy weights to provide their clients with strategy and guidance on how to integrate digital and social media into the overall marketing and communication mix. Little side note: an
alarming high percentage of these heavy weights have
no experience in the digital and social media world. Even more alarming is that the
teams they roll out, into the field have none
either.
A fascinating amount of power is given to people who have
no clue what’s what in Social Media land. It’s not because you’ve read
Groundswell or
The New Normal that you are fully equipped to deep dive successfully into this fast moving area. It’s not because you know how a
journalist thinks that you should take it for granted that a
blogger thinks or behaves in the same way. It’s not because you’re a
hotshot in direct marketing that you understand –at all- how
twitter works. It’s not because you were fab in influencing through 25 square meter advertorials that you can safely assume that a
banner on a site will actually
benefit your client or cause in any way. It’s not because your
toddler is reasonably good with
Lego that it is statistically safe to let him/her play with a fully loaded
Kalashnikov.
I’m confronted on a daily basis with
blogger relations experts that have never blogged,
community managers that are online rookies, and
twitter experts that have less
reach and followers than my 83 year old gardening neighbor on a rainy day. Robin Wauters of
TechCrunch gave a PR professional
a full broadside years ago for not playing online
engagement by the
online netiquette rules. And Wauters was
so right. Too many
arrogant old style off-line influencers think they can take the online new interactive
digital scene by storm… and birthright. They look down on this booming online
realm with an explosive mixture of denial, ignorance, arrogance, even
disdain: an ideal cocktail for
guaranteed distaster.
Not so long ago, agencies tried to offer top-notch
journalists,
analysts,
Pulitzer Prize nominees and
politicians a job to get extremely valuable
hands-on knowledge,
credibility and experience in house. To think that these
same people will make the difference in
online engagement is a
huge mistake that cannot be remediated by an
over lunch training session. Big time for agencies and their clients to go hunt for
social media wizards, top-notch
bloggers, proven
star-profiled tweeps and highly connected
social networkers.
Only by
upgrading their workforce with
Digital Wizards will companies, organizations and agencies stay afoot in this
morphing landscape. How did
Cary Grant say it again: it takes
a thief to catch a
thief….
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