Do You Have a Gardener?
Near the end of the opening session of the 2008 Association Technology Conference, the speaker (and co-author of the book Wikinomics—How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything) Anthony Williams, answered a question about how associations can ensure that social media tools such as wikis and blogs will succeed. In short, his answer was to get a gardener—a person to help you champion the cause. Someone to help plant, grow, and cultivate social media. He said, that social media, like plants, need care to grow and flourish otherwise they will wither and die early on.
Of course, the nature of a session like that is that the speaker can’t answer every question every attendee has. So I will run my questions by you.
Do you have a gardener for your social media? What does your gardener do? Should the gardener be staff or a volunteer? And how do you go about getting your gardener the tools needed to produce lush social media landscape?
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Comments
Good post, it makes a good point. A social media strategy isn't like a brochure or a newsletter that you plan , execute, evaluate and boom you're done and move on to the next project. It's an on-going endeavor that will require dedicated staff, either new or existing.
Posted by: Mark Forstneger | January 31, 2008 2:12 PM
Thank you Mark. Another idea, if an association doesn't have the resources for staff to be the gardener--a dedicated volunteer or group of volunteers might be an effective alternative.
Posted by: Caron Mason | January 31, 2008 3:26 PM
At the eKnowledge: Combining Knowledge Management & Social Media session, AIA General Manager Mark Carpenter said that AIA hired five prominent architect members to seed their Soloso site. One of the architects works full-time creating content for the site, and the other four work half-time. That's quite a commitment to gardening!
Posted by: Becky Granger | January 31, 2008 9:18 PM
The association is the garden. We are all gardeners!
Trying to separate "here's the garden of social media with some specific gardeners" is an approach doomed for failure from the beginning. Much like how we now view marketing or customer service (ie, we are all in marketing, we are all in customer service), social media should not be thought of as a separate bucket of responsibility/action
Sure, at the IGDA we may have different people (some staff, some volunteer) playing slightly different roles with different parts of the garden. But, ultimately, we are just one big lush garden of goodness.
Posted by: Jason Della Rocca | February 1, 2008 6:54 PM
We now have a Social Media Program Manager who will be our gardner. But she can't seed the sites with technical info. That will have to be volunteers. But she can make sure she makes the "ask" to get the right people gardening.
Posted by: Matt Baehr | February 5, 2008 11:06 AM