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Let's now move on to the slightly more nebulous area of unofficial representatives.
As we discussed earlier, the reasons to
include people who don't have formal standing in the organization are many.
One of them may be that they are more familiar with what's going on out there
than the folks with the official roles.
While I take great pride in the education
I receive for the work that I do as well
as make great efforts to stay current,
I'm also smart enough to realize that I can't stay up to date on everything.
This includes the explosive speed with
which new social media platforms are being developed as well as the dizzying rate of
progress in platform functionality. For that, I need to tap in the people who
are interacting with these platforms on a daily basis.
The second reason;
because these unofficial experts are
playing with these applications regularly, they are far more likely to be familiar
with all of their capabilities than people who only do this as part of their job.
They may also know more about classic pilot air mistakes that novice users
make when first using the applications,
something that can save you and your organization a great deal of unnecessary
pain and embarrassment.
This point was made very clear to my wife and myself when we first started getting
invested in this Facebook to stay in communication with our daughters.
My wife went in, populated her initial Facebook page and then was very happy to
be communicating with newly found friends as well as our relatives.
Over the course of about six months, she discovered that there were attributes in
Facebook that you could update; status, likes, relationship, et cetera.
She went in and did the necessary updates only to find out that automatically,
Facebook could sent out a notification
saying that she had changed her status from unknown to married.
Imagine her surprise when she was flooded
by email messages congratulating her on getting married to me after 30 years of
living together. Clearly, an unknown pilot error led to by
not being familiar with the capabilities of the platform.
A third reason is that the inclusion of individuals who the rest of the
organization view is unofficial or underground social media experts says
a lot about the level of quality,
the organization is expecting as it relates to
the final deliverable of the social media
policy team. In terms of unofficial representatives,
the best way to identify who these people
might be is to think about who you would go to if you wanted to learn about
a particular platform for yourself.
And while you probably won't be able to include your child or his or her friends
on the team or the neighborhood kid,
you can think about people that may have similar profiles.
Some are interns, GenX and GenY employees who may not have risen to an official
position yet who still possess extraordinary knowledge.
Individuals who are making extensive use of social media for legitimate private
purposes, for example, running a small business or individuals who understand how
various social media platforms are being used in other non-United States locations.
The key here is not to confuse technical
expertise or seniority with social media expertise.
For example, how do you smile in these applications?
How do you yell in these applications? What way of work is this social media
application replacing?
When thinking about unofficial representatives, I'm struck by the phrase,
"The digital native".
If we take a step back for a second
and compare it to individuals, I think you will see what I mean.
The first individual is someone who
is born in this country 50 years ago. They have lived their entire life in the
United States from the beginning to the
current state.
The other individual is someone who came to this country at the age of 25.
Here she lived in another part of the world and had a set of experiences as
a child, much different than the first individual.
They're both at a party together and someone brings up the question of
Gilligan's Island or I love Lucy or the day that Kennedy was assassinated,
no matter how much reading and how much cultural assimilation that second
individual has had, they will not be able to understand those situations with the
same level of nuance and depth as the first individual.
This same concept holds true for the digital native.
We as older employees cannot know the scope and the breath and the impact of
these technologies as well as individuals who are born into this age.
It's therefore critical that you embrace
and encourage individuals who know much more about these applications to become
members of your team than simply those who are
official representatives from the organization.