I know what you should do. You should hire one person to handle all the email that your company needs to process on a day-to-day basis. Imagine all the time it would save you. It would also make those who aren’t good with email more productive! They don’t have to know about what everyone in your company is doing because it’s just email, after all.
Sound like a good idea?
Actually, it’s probably one of the worst ideas you could think of. Some things – like email – need to be learned by everyone in your organization. The reality is that people communicate via email and to be a successful communicator, you have to have at least a basic understanding of how to send and receive professional emails.
Now.. think about social media.
I see organizations all the time making the decision to hire someone to do social media for them – for the entire organization. There are a few things wrong with this. While one person could drive an entire organization towards change, they can’t do it alone.
- If you are using social media well, the volume will become too much for one person to handle.
- To appropriately represent your brand, people from different sectors of your organization should be familiar with social media so that they can handle questions and issues as they arise.
- If that person leaves your organization, what will happen to your social media efforts?
- If that person gets angry at your organization, how could they ruin your reputation using the tools they have such unrestricted access to? How will management fix these mistakes if they don’t even know they are happening?
These are just a few of my concerns with putting the responsibility of social media solely on one person. Just as email has become a primary form of communication, social media is taking it’s place and will soon be a communication mode that we must all become familiar with. I’m not saying everyone in your organization needs to tweet every minute of every day, but there needs to be a comfort level with interacting with the tools.
What do you think?
