△ MENU/TOP △

Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
SearchClose Icon

Where does the telephone belong in your organization?

Where does the telephone belong in your organization?

What department should have responsibility for the telephone?If the question sounds absurd, consider that once, companies exercised tremendous discretion in providing employees with access to phones. In the early days of phones in business, concerns ranged from employees wasting time on calls to the inadvertent sharing of confidential information made too easy by casual conversation, from rising telephone costs incurred by employees who didn’t really need one to outright laziness as employees put off writing letters, opting instead to wait until the last minute and then just pick up the phone.

The idea of doing business today without a phone is unthinkable. Everyone has them, from clerical staff in accounts payable departments to hourly workers on factory floors (who, if unable to use their mobile phones, walk a few steps to a phone mounted on a factory wall).

The answer to the question, then, is everywhere. There isn’t a place in the organization a phone doesn’t belong. Because that’s a lot of telephone usage, most organizations have a telecommunications department or vendor who handles equipment selection, configuration, installation, policies, and repairs, among other things.

The phone is worth remembering as the question of where social media belongs in the organization arises yet again. Like the phone, the answer is simple: Social media belongs everywhere. Public relations staff use it for public relations. Marketing staff use it for marketing. Customer service personnel use it for customer service. Engineers, accountants, lawyers, the human resources team, software developers, scientists—whoever your organization employs, whatever job they do, they now function in a world in which social media has become as standard a means of connecting and communicating as the telephone.

If you’ve ever wondered what the term “social business” means, that’s it: Everybody uses social tools to do their jobs better. We have reached this point because most of the people employees deal with on a day-to-day basis, both inside and outside the company, also are using social tools to do their jobs better.

But what about social media’s equivalent of the telecommunications department? Sam Fiorella, in a February 2 post, makes a case for PR filling this role, though he qualifies his argument by limiting PR’s supremacy to a company’s social media marketing activities.

In her February 6 response to Fiorella’s post, Gini Dietrich points to a comment from marketing thought leader Danny Brown who disagreed. “Two words,” he wrote. “Justine Sacco.”

Any department—including Marketing and even a dedicated social media team—can employ people capable of stupid mistakes or lapses in judgment. It was, after all, a social media agency representative who fired off a tweet insulting Detroit drivers, getting himself fired by his agency and his agency fired by General Motors. Nobody’s immune. But I suspect Danny knows this.

When business used social media primarily for communicating with stakeholders, I stood fast for PR as the company’s social media coordinator. Among the departments that employed social media, PR was in the best position to use it well. Advertising and marketing are accustomed to pushing messages one-way, while PR is primarily about conversations and relationships. (There’s a reason relations is part of the name.)

But now that social media is part of every employee’s toolkit—along with email, instant messaging and the phone—organizations need to take a different approach. Fortunately, there are companies like Intel that figured it out a long time ago.

A Center of Excellence (CoE) pulls together a team made up of people with the right skillsets for coordinating social media throughout the enterprise. Depending on the size of your organization, this could be a group of employees dedicated full-time to their CoE role or a team of people with other roles devoting some percentage of their time to the CoE.

Responsibilities at the CoE level include…

  • Governance (including keeping policies up to date and making sure they’re well communicated)
  • Training to ensure employees have the skills they need to use their social software effectively
  • Assessing and acquiring social software that meets requirements from throughout the organization, including monitoring tools and social media management systems
  • Ensuring employees have access to best practices

One of the biggest problems companies encounter when assembling a social media team—whether using the CoE model or some other approach—is knowing what skills team members need. Fortunately, my colleagues Richard Binhammer, Mark Dollins and I have figured that out. Take a look at our SME Squared offering for details. We’d be happy (obviously) to conduct a social media skills audit for your organization, mapping it to the company’s strategy and plans.

(By the way, you’d be foolish not to have a PR person in the CoE, since there really is no department better experienced at two-way communication.)

Whether you tap Richard, Mark and me to help, use another resource, or go it alone, remember that every employee is (or should be) using social software to be more efficient at their jobs. It is from that level that the coordinating function for social media should be tackled.

Comments
  • 1.Finally some sense about the age old topic of who should "own" social media. (If I had a nickel for every PR article about it, I would be relaxing on a hammock with an island drink somewhere right now.) It's time people in complementary job functions stopped fretting foolishly over who is in "control" and started thinking like colleagues with a shared vision and mission. Social may be everywhere but it is bound to have challenges and worse if those using it in silos do not even talk to each other within the same organizations. Follow Shel's common sense advice and your organization will be much better off!

    John Senall | February 2014 | Buffalo, NY

  • 2.As always, thanks for your great insights Shel ...

    Mary Wilson | February 2014 | St. Louis, MO

  • 3.Excellent article and great topic, thanks for sharing Shel

    Rachel Miller @AllthingsIC | February 2014 | London, UK

  • 4.Hi Shel
    The other aspect of this that I have been thinking about lately is that social media ( in a professional business use case) has emerged so quickly that many people get thrown some new assignments without the training and chance to grow into it. The SME2 process we have developed really helps an organization commit to professional development of its people in a way that makes sense for the individual, the team and the business.

    Combine the points you raise here + a desire to "grow talent" and this truism from @Gapingvoid
    http://www.gapingvoidart.com/gallery/people-are-our-only-asset/

    Results can be social excellence, more rewarding work experience and professional growth...

    Richard Binhammer | February 2014 | austin, TX

  • 5.We've been talking about this very issue on my blog this week. Also, I had several questions from the floor at a speaking engagement yesterday about who 'owns' social and what about the blurred lines between personal and professional. Thanks for this excellent post Shel.

    Sherrilynne | February 2014 | Ottawa

Comment Form

« Back