Media Emerging

“What’s the ROI?” is the most talked about topic in social media since…well…ever. A flurry of social media ROI posts by Really Smart People has the issue front of mind. Again. But there’s one response from the boss even more crushing than “What’s the ROI?”

Silence.

Resistance might at least assure you the bosses are listening. Their recalcitrance may simply mean you haven’t convinced them yet. But silence crippling. The only thing worse than being wrong is being irrelevant.

Why Is Social Media Irrelevant To Your Boss/Organization?

There are numerous reasons your pleas for a social media program could be falling on deaf ears:

Social Media is a bad fit for your company. 
You’ve been a self-declared Social Media Wizard for nine months. Your boss has been doing his job for two decades. Let’s face it, maybe he knows something you don’t. Some organizations simply don’t need social media. Examples? I dunno…funeral parlors?

You’re irrelevant to the boss.
Higher-ups get proposals every day from staffers who want to get noticed and climb the ladder. Yours is just another pitch in a mile-high stack. Even if you’ve found the mythical social media ROI (which you haven’t), you’ll have to catch the boss’s attention (which ain’t easy), and prove that your risk/reward proposition has less risk and more reward than Bob’s (which it doesn’t).

They know you’ll do it for free.
Your boss could listen to you go rah-rah for SM. Or, he could just ignore you, and you’ll start putting the pieces of a social media program together anyway. You do the extra work, you make the investment, the company gets the reward, and you get none of the responsibility or added salary you want. You’ve been snookered, friend.

Here are a few more potential reasons nobody’s listening to you:

• You’re talking to the wrong person (a.k.a., NOT the real decision-maker)
• Your proposals don’t align with corporate priorities/objectives
• You pissed someone off
• You sound like the crazy guy who speaks a language NOBODY else speaks
• You forgot the “show” part of “show-n-tell”

What Can You Do If Nobody’s Listening? 

Well, you could throw a fit. Stomp on the floor. Cry. Interruption marketing as a means of promoting social media — oh, the irony!

Here are some more effective (I hope) ideas:

Enlist SM advocates from elsewhere in the company. The company will have a hard time ignoring a groundswell of employees, customers, and vendors buzzing about the benefits of social media. Many hands lightens the load, no?

Report success instead of requesting opportunity. Every time you land a new account, solve a client’s problem, or achieve any other victory, brag about it. Send your boss an email and be sure to mention the social media tool that was critical to success.

Play the jealousy card. Has a competitor scored any wins with social media? Make sure the decision-maker at your company knows about it.

Build slowly. Instead of getting frustrated, start small. Ask for permission to blog. Put your company holiday party pics on your personal Flickr page. Plant a few seeds. Nurture them. Cultivate. Be patient.

Speak the language of commoners. Instead of prattling about Plurk, Yammer, Meebo and Fizzidoodle (okay, I made that one up), get back to the common English you used before you were a social media dork. Try analogies. The phrase “social networking” may sound buzzword-y to your boss, but he knows what the Rotary Club is.

Even if you try these techniques, you may still get pushback. But hey, pushback’s a good thing. At least you know they’re listening.

Last week, I Tweeted a blurb about the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looking for a social media intern. Kathleen Danielson asked a question that’s relevant to any jobseeker in the Web 2.0 era: “Do I have to be in St. Louis?”

Or, put more broadly: If you’re hiring me to perform a social media role, should I be required to live in the city where your headquarters are?

I touched base with Kurt Greenbaum, Director of Social Media at the Post-Dispatch, to get his thoughts. Here’s some of what he had to say:

While there is certainly much that someone could do remotely in this job, there are two pieces of it that make it important to be physically present:

- One aspect of this job involves going into the community to promote our social networking site, MySTLtoday.com. It has just launched within the last three weeks. By promote, I mean meet with individuals and organizations who might have an interest in participating, coach them in how to use it, encourage them to participate and highlight their content when they do. I have had three such meetings in the past two days and will be leaving for another one shortly this morning.

- A second aspect is to help coach people in our own newsroom who are new to the notion of social media. I have literally shown people how to send their first text message in order to let them participate in Twitter coverage. There are plenty of similar examples of how I personally — and with help, more effectively — need to bring my colleagues along and show them how these tools can help their journalism.

You need a genuine familiarity with the community to succeed in social media. As Kurt put it, you have to live in St. Louis to appreciate gooey buttercake, the Highway 40 commuter nightmare, and a distinctly St. Louis obsession with knowing people’s high school alma maters.

I also wanted to hear the social media community’s thoughts, so I posed the question on Twitter. Here’s some of the response:

@jesseliebman: The whole nature of Social Media is connecting with any and everyone. Therefore, no, he doesn’t need to be in the target city

@budesigns: There would be certain advantages to being local (esp for internal client face-time), but I wouldn’t require it.

@nickfooter: As long as the intern has the ability to get online, No. He might not understand the culture of his target completely though.

@brianbaute: I say yes. I’ve found it tough to be part of the Charlotte SM community while missing tweetups, btynebiz lunch, wordcamp, etc.

@mc4849: Remote resource could support a ‘name’ like @ColonelTribune but @jamesjanega @acmaurer more in-touch because they are local. Acknowledge that SocMedia is greater than just Twitter, but authenticity sometimes requires face-time to get the right info.

So what say you? Can a social media job be done remotely, or should it be tied to a geographic location? Somewhere in between?