There has been no shortage lately of commentary about where social media responsibility will reside in organizations. The broad categories of opinion shake out like this:

• Social media will wind up being PR’s (or Communications’ or Public Affairs’) responsibility.
• Social media will be the responsibility of those who champion it
• Social media responsibility will fall to project teams and others who have a need to use it
• Social media is so complex that specialists will emerge with their own box on the org chart
• Social media naturally belongs in HR and Training
• Social media cannot be controlled, so nobody will own it; there will be no specialists; everybody just will use it

I’ve been mulling over all these viewpoints and the arguments that support them, but last week’s revelation that the ExxonMobilCorp Twitterer was not an authoritative representative of the organization has helped me crystalize my thinking.

The need for specialists

This post is one of several by those who believe that the window is closing on social media specialists. Because the use of social media is becoming so widespread, it becomes the work of everyone, the argument goes. But the history of business is replete with bad outcomes when everybody is given free reign over technologies and practices that require a higher level of expertise.

Remember desktop publishing? The introduction of Pagemaker and Ventura Publisher on the work scene heralded a brief era in which employees throughout organizations believed they no longer needed to work with communicators to get their messages out. Instead, they all developed their own newsletters. Those 8-1/2-by-11-inch publications often featured six narrow columns, 16 unreadable fonts, and scads of clip art. (Remember the flying money bag?) Employees were buried in dozens of such newsletters until management demanded that the communications department do something about it.

Last week, we had ExxonMobilCorp on Twitter. For a while, it seemed that the energy giant had established a presence on the micro-blogging channel and was engaging in conversation with its publics not unlike Frank Eliason and his team have been doing with the ComcastCares account. There can be no mistaking Janet’s intent. The very name of the account says clearly, “This is the corporation speaking.” Except it wasn’t. We still don’t know who Janet is, although I suspect she’s a well-meaning and dedicated employee doing what she thinks is right but without benefit of policies or guidelines from her employer.

Those who believe that everyone in the organization should be able to freely use social media need to pay attention to the ExxonMobilCorp story. Janet used a wholly inappropriate image on the account. ExxonMobil is selling off its service stations and getting out of the retail business, yet Janet elected to use a picture of service stations. Her approach to some answers were incredibly off-base. When Tom Raftery raised the Valdez lawsuit as an issue, Janet responded by noting that the Valdez spill was small in comparison to some others. And remember, readers believed this answer—an attempt to minimize the situation—to be the authoritative position of ExxonMobil Corporation.

On the Energy Collective blog, Robin Fray Carey says she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with what Janet did, equating her to Robert Scoble’s “Scobleizer” blog during his tenure at Microsoft. But Robert identified who he was and never claimed to be writing corporate statements of record. In fact, when I asked him about that, Robert told me if I was looking for the authoritative statement of record, I should contact Microsoft’s PR agency!

Won’t everyone be an expert?

I couldn’t disagree more strongly with the notion that social media will become every employee’s responsibility simply because every employee will already be using it. By that logic, we don’t need motion picture producers and directors. Everybody watches movies, so everybody should be able to produce the next “The Dark Knight.” While we all have access to the tools to produce a YouTube video, there’s a big difference between an entertaining online video and a really great theatrical movie. (With $400 million in box office over its first three weekends, “The Dark Knight” seems to be proving there’s still plenty of demand for good theatrical entertainment.) Similarly, there’s a big difference between a group of people having a conversation in a Facebook forum and an organization communicating appropriately in multiple social media channels in order to achieve specific, measurable business objectives.

The fact that anybody can scramble eggs doesn’t mean that anybody can be the executive chef at Boulevard. The very definition of a social media specialist in business is one who knows how to apply social media to the achievement of the organization’s goals.

Remember, we’re talking about business communication here. While social media cannot be controlled, best practices can be applied to how an organization approaches it. Metrics can be brought to bear. Strategies can be implemented. Policies and guidelines introduced.

Don’t leave it to teams

The technographics ladder is one of the most useful resources Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff offer in their book, “Groundswell.” It’s clear from reviewing this data that not everyone is a content creator; similarly, not everyone inclined to comment on existing content. A lot of people are collectors or joiners. Others are spectators and many continue to be completely inactive.

IBM launched an employee blogging initiative based on the belief that it’s 300,000-plus employees could evangelize its products and services better than any amount of paid advertising or marketing ever could. But fewer than 4,000 employees have taken IBM up on the offer. Michael Hyatt earned considerable attention when he posted the proposed employee blogging guidelines for Thomas Nelson Publishers, where he is CEO. So far, only a dozen of his employees have started blogs. Not everyone wants to blog or tweet or podcast.

The implications for organizational communication should be clear. Some teams will do outstanding work in social media because a social media champion on the team will be inclined to write the team’s blog or participate in the target community, as Mike Donnelly did so brilliantly during the Coca-Cola Virtual Thirst campaign in Second Life. (Mike engaged as an equal participant in discussions started by bloggers writing about the campaign.) But other teams, bereft of any social media skills, will either not engage at all or will blow it badly. (There are plenty of examples of people who have blown it badly.)

No, you can’t control social media. But you can coordinate the organization’s offical engagement. In organizations where someone—an individual or a department—is looking after the company’s social media interests, no single team will be left in the dark when it should include a member with solid social media chops.

Don’t leave it to technicians

One faction sees IT supplying the social media experts who will coordinate the company’s activities. While champions can come from anywhere in the organization, I would resist the idea that IT itself should lead organization’s social media use. To me (and this is an analogy I’ve used before), that’s like letting the printers control the content of print publications. The printer’s job is to make sure the publication looks the way it’s supposed to. Writers, editors, and publishers determine the content.

There is a considerable difference between expertise with the software and servers that make social media work and the content people produce with those tools.

Champions

Organizations should celebrate champions, whether they’re advocating for social media, social responsibility, environmental stewardship, business transparency or any other noble undertaking. In the social media realm, there are plenty of examples of the contributions champions bring to the table. Look at Best Buy, where a couple of social media champions launched BlueShirt Nation, a social network for retail sales associates. The response and outcomes have been huge.

Champions, though, are not enough. In many cases, champions may have the required enthusiasm but not the big-picture understanding of the impact of social media on business. Again, while control is unrealistic, orchestration of a company’s efforts is vital. 

HR and Training

The argument that HR and Training (usually training reports to HR) should be responsible for social media dovetails nicely with the argument that nobody will “own” social media because everybody will use it. In that case, somebody has to provide the training to employees to ensure they’re using the tools properly. Companies with training departments should use them for social media training. But should the substance of that training come from the trainers themselves? Or from HR?

During the 14 years I spent in corporations (ARCO, Mattel, and Allergan), I always reported through HR—either completely or as part of a double-solid-line arragnement—and I worked extensively with trainers. Based on that experience, I have to reject the idea that these departments should be responsible for social media. Rather, whoever is responsible should partner with these departments to produce employee training. The substance of that training, though, needs to come from the specialists whose responsibility it is to coordinate the company’s overall approach to social media.

So what’s the answer?

I’m afraid the answer is messy and jumbled, much like social media itself.

Public Relations will, without question, manage social media in a lot of organizations—but in many organizations, the scope of that effort will be limited to PR’s usual audiences. Those who reject PR’s management of social media do so based on a fundamental misunderstanding of public relations, one I have addressed before. They believe that PR is all about broadcast, usually because press releases and other PR broadcast tools are the only elements of PR to which they’ve ever been exposed. The fact that you haven’t seen the other dimensions of PR doesn’t mean they don’t exist or aren’t practiced.

PR is, at its core, about coordinating an organization’s relationships with those constituent publics whose permission to operate makes it possible for company to do what it does. Good PR is all about relationships. Good PR departments (and agencies working with companies), where social media has been embraced and studied and understood, should fill that coordination role. I’m sure if Charles Fonbrum were asked, he would say social media falls within the scope of the Chief Reputation Officer’s charter. In most organizations, that’s a communications job.

But not every public falls within PR’s jurisdiction. Microsoft’s PR department, for instance, has little to do with communication between the company’s programmers and the community of software engineers developing applications to run on the Windows OS. Frank and the Comcastcares team are part of customer service at Comcast, not PR.

If a company’s communications department emerges as the hub of social media expertise, why shouldn’t PR provide that expertise throughout the organization? There’s no reason PR shouldn’t be accountable for how its company uses social media.

There will also be plenty of companies where PR isn’t up to the task. This shouldn’t be a big surprise. I clearly remember a study from the Council of Public Relations Firms from around 1998 or so warning the profession to get up to speed on the World Wide Web or lose business to boutiques. This isn’t something PR hasn’t been through before.

There’s a third option: PR departments can acquire the expertise, as The Ford Motor Company did when it hired Scott Monty, who reports through the head of communciations (who reports to the CEO), and is tasked with developing a companywide internal and external social media strategy.

Who communicates?

Corporations don’t communicate. People do. Corporations don’t blog, or tweet, or podcast. People do. What, then, is the role of specialists/coordinators of social media within an organization of people who communicate to a variety of people using a variety of channels in a variety of different ways? The answer is simple in concept, complex in execution. The role is to ensure that the social media used throughout the organization enhances the organization’s reputation and helps the company achieve its goals.

Whoever fills the specialist role—PR or a discrete social media department—will be responsible for the following:

• Ensuring all employees are aligned with the company’s plans, goals, and objectives; that employees know the company’s position on various issues; and that employees have access to resources to help them communicate whatever it is they want or need to communicate.
• Coordinating the development and communication of the company’s social computing guidelines so every employee knows exactly what his or her obligations and responsibilities are
• Overseeing the selection and deployment of tools employees can use to engage in social media both internally and externally
• Monitoring the social media space in order to identify new channels and alert the organization to the implications of those channels (e.g., the need to claim key trademark names for Friendfeed rooms before somebody brandjacks your identities)
• Ensuring appropriate social media engagement occurs where it supports the business (e.g., identifying a gap in a product team that is not employing social media as part of its efforts when social media would be an appropriate channel)
• Coordinating the use of social media for the business’s authoritative statements of record
• Working with other departments, such as HR and Training, to ensure employees at all levels know how to best and most responsibly use these channels as representatives of the company
• Identify social media champions from throughout the organization so the company can take advantage of their passion and expertise.
• Monitoring all of the organization’s various social media efforts to ensure it all serves the interests of the organization and supports its reputation
• Reporting the aggregated results of the company’s social media efforts to the company’s leadership
• Counseling leadership to ensure good decisions are made (like not shutting down a blog the first time a negative comment appears)
• Identifying and deploying the best monitoring resources in order to get apples-to-apples results from across the enterprise
• Serving in a consultative role for any department or team that wants help
• Identifying best practices and ensuring those using social media are aware of them
• Ensuring channels exist that allow employees to contribute based on their technographic inclinations (creator, critic, sharer, joiner, etc.)
• Building links between traditional communication and social media (e.g., helping advertisers use thir channel to drive customers to conversations)
• Using social media tools to support the company’s social media efforts (e.g., social networks that allow employees to share successes and ideas for social media applications with one another)

All of which makes it pretty obvious that someone needs to orchestrate the company’s social media efforts, that it can’t be just a bunch of tools available to employees. Organizations require…well…organization. And even if social media ultimately is used at the ground level—as it should be—by employees to build their own communities, reach out to their own publics, collaborate with their own teams and speak with their own voices, it all ultimately must serve the best interests of the organization.

In many companies—maybe even most—PR/communications will be best suited to this specialized role, and uniquely suited to coordinating the company’s official and authoritative engagements in social media. But regardless of which department that winds up coordinating social media, companies will need experts (like Scott Monty) who know how to apply these channels most effectively on the organization’s behalf. If nobody’s specializing, nobody’s focusing. That’s when we’ll find ourselves, like a bad flashback, reliving the days when desktop publishing was uncoordinated and running out of control. Those were bad, bad days.