Conversations and Connections - social media at SAS

Panelists (left to right) Laura Fitton (@pistachio), John Andrews (@Katadhin), Lucretia Pruitt (@GeekMommy) and Jason Falls (@JasonFalls)

My notes from The Future of Business on the Social Web panel at the Social Media Business Forum

Jeff Cohen started the panel with a question: Has social media gone beyond communications? Does it impact everything a business does?

Jason: "Social media" is an adjective. There's always something after it. The "thought leaders" in the social space have been talking about the concept of social business for the last year or so. If you take away all their marketing spin, it comes down to how we are engaging customers. Social media marketing allows for individuals and brands to engage their customers on a level they've never done before. If you transfer the online engagement to offline, like Panera offering free wifi, yes they are turning themselves into a social business, but they're finding a new way to engage customers.

Lucretia: I argued against the term "social media" pretty vehemently for about a year because it referred to the tools. One of the things I've found is you don't get to control what people call something. The community, and by that I mean the people with the loudest voice, tend to pick their own terms. A couple of years ago we were stuck on "Web 2.0." "Social media" has become our junk bag term for "anything that might possibly use Twitter." It really is supposed to be in relation to using specific tools to achieve a goal, but that's not how people use it.

John: When I was a lowly marketing assistant for Sara Lee, the magic bullet in marketing was getting the right message to the right customers at the right time. Now you have that power and it's freaking everybody out. Who cares what you call it? In the end of the day it's about engaging people in a real, authentic and meaningful way. We'll go through another naming cycle in the next six months. The reality is it's about customer engagement.

Laura: The word is "media." We'll get over the "social" part eventually. Do we call it "book media" or "radio media"? In March 2007, I looked at my then-husband and said, "Where do I do the browser upgrade to get Web 2.0?" And I wasn't kidding. It's silly to have a social media specialist.

Jeff: Beyond the term, what is changing about how businesses communicate? Should companies wrap their heads differently around how they engage with customers?

Lucretia: "Only if they want to do better." The 20th century is over but we're back to 19th century ways of communicating. It's about how people share information. It's the same as it's been for centuries.

Jason: Because of social tools that businesses see as beneficial, we're returning to our moral compass as a marketplace and a society. We hear terms like honesty and transparency. If you strip away the technology and corporate mumbo jumbo, consumers are saying, "Stop lying to me and telling me to buy crap. Allow me to rely on the word of mouth marketing and referrals I get from my friends, not listening to marketing and advertising spin."

Lucretia: Criticism is a privilege to a business owner and if you don't see that, you're missing an opportunity to do better.

John: We're still in early days. Jason and I were saying that next year we need to spend more time at conferences talking to people outside of the group of people who already understand social media.

Jeff: We realize that times are changing. What do businesses need to do now to be properly positioned in the next three to five years?

Laura: Start listening. My four word social media hack: Listen, learn, care, serve. The more useful your content is for someone else... This is a service business.

Lucretia: I'm not sure about the "serve" part. A lot of people in social media don't have that noble intention, but I didn't go out to make the world a better place. I wanted to connect with people, but it wasn't with the intention to serve.

Laura: If a company is generally solving someone's problem, their sales go up, so it isn't as altruistic as it sounds.

Jason: Companies have to relearn how to have conversations with people. It's not that we've forgotten as individuals. For some reason, there's been this detachment between individuals and companies having conversations. We have this fear that the CEO is looking over our shoulder, or the legal department will slap our hands. We have to understand that our customers want to have conversations with people, and sometimes it's with people who work for companies.

Lucretia: One of the things I keep hearing, when we mention the legal department, it's said as an epithet. If you want to change it, we'll have to change the legislation. Companies need to get active in changing liability laws so that those things the lawyers are worried about won't be an issue in five years. The lawyers arent' just mean; it's their job to protect the company's interest. How do we change the legislation to reflect how our businesses will operate in the future?

John: This will come down to business results. At the end of the day if you can't answer the question empirically that it sold more stuff, it won't get done.

Jason: Mainstream reality check: For the most part, people don't mind advertisements from companies they like. They hate advertisements from companies they don't.

Laura: Another social media strategy hack: Make good sh*t. People say Apple has no social media strategy, but they have the most thriving social media community in the world because they have so many evangelists.

Jason: Apple has created a community without trying to create a community, because they make good products. Fan groups for products, TV shows, etc. have grown up because of the fans.

Lucretia: No Facebook fan page will ever make up for a crappy product.

Laura: It's hard to do, but it's becoming easier every day to make great products because we have a huge firehose of people talking about what they want. Social media needs to get past marketing and get down into R&D and product development. Social media needs to filter in to many places in the organization.

Jason to Laura: You said yesterday that you put all of your eggs in the Twitter basket. What if Twitter changes or goes away?

Laura: In 2008 I staked my whole livelihood on the idea that Twitter would take off. The key of Twitter is mobile, social, networked small messages. If Twitter goes away, the things I am still interested in will endure.

Question: You talked mostly about social media for marketing. Can you reframe the comments on how to use social media for publishing? When you're trying to get the news in social media, how do you reach the people who are used to the newspaper.

Lucretia: I don't think social media will kill the newspaper. It's the difference between data and analysis. The analysis aspect of social media is huge. We turn to newspapers and periodicals to answer the question, "What does that mean to me?" Facebook, Twitter and all the other tools allow us to ask people, "What does that mean to you?"

Question from Wayne Sutton: There was a time when businesses were trying to create their own social networks. It really didn't work because they found their customers were on Facebook, forums, Ning, etc. Is it valuable now for businesses to create content and own it on their websites?

Jason: I agree that businesses need to be all about creating content, but they have to be not content centric but consumer centric. If your customers are on Facebook, give it to them on Facebook. They may not want to go to your Web site.

Laura: Be super careful what you measure. If the numbers are "super easy" to measure, they may not actually be valuable. I had a business ask me how many Twitter followers meant we were doing a good job. It depends on who you are and what you're selling.

Adam Covati question: There are a lot of people here with a lot of needs. What have you seen that is your pet favorite that actually does something useful?

Jason: When I worked for the alcohol, wine and spirits industry I spent all my time on a forum about bourbon at straighbourbon.com, because those guys were "flippin' crazy about bourbon." I could go to them and tell them we were launching a new product and not just get the message out to 300 people, but 300 people who would influence thousands. Forums and message boards, depending about the niche, can be a very important component of your marketing mix.

Lucretia: My favorite thing this year is Whrrl. Robert Scoble said it's the next Twitter.

Question: As a state government employee I had to fight to get here. I have to go back to my office and explain why we should engage in social media. I need concrete advice.

Jason: Social media has emerged because this is where the majority of the American people have gone to talk about products and services, including governments, and you work for us.

Laura: Social media saves money. As a taxpayer I'm getting annoyed that my tax dollars are being spent on expensive things that don't work.

John: Show them that people are already talking about you online and that you aren't there.

Question: I have a personal pet theory that B2B and B2C are going away. It's all just P2P. What are your thoughts on B2B and B2C emerging as just "marketing"?

Jason: Laura said it earlier: It's person to person (P2P). You sell to people. If you're reaching out to them in an honest way, you'll win. That's how it's always been; we're just putting it into words.

Lucretia: People don't buy from companies, they buy from people. If I'm going to refer a service provider it's because I have a relationship with them.

Question: What's the one thing you think you did wrong when you first got started, and the one thing you knew was right the moment you did it?

Laura: The reason my name is Pistachio is because I had a hideous green home office. My first Twitter account was called Pistachio and was very anonymous. Don't look at anybody else and think they know it and you don't. Just do it and screw up and iterate. My best thing? Be lucky. I've been in the right place and I'm grateful.

John: As a 12-year consumer packaged goods guy, you get trained early on that Proctor & Gamble invented it and there's a model for how you do it. That model does not work here. I tried to use it and failed miserably. To get over that model I talked to the most knowledgeable people in the space and asked, "How do I do this?" and I listened.

Lucretia: I've blogged for a really long time. As a college professor I used to teach people how not to leave an Internet footprint. For the first year on Twitter I refused to say who I was and refused to trust anybody. It wasn't until January 2008 that I decided to come from behind the curtain and took responsibility for what I was doing. Owning what you do is the hardest thing ever, because sometimes we do really stupid stuff. The smartest thing I did? I've been very lucky in my opportunities and the people I've gotten to know. Those opportunities present themselves; the smartest thing I've done is to take them.

Jason: I did not prioritize search for my clients for a year or so and I regret that because I could have done a lot better job for them. The one thing that I've done right, and has gotten me in trouble, is that I am unbelievably honest to a fault and have no edit button whatsoever. When people ask for my opinion, I give it.

Panelists: (left to right) Jason Falls, @JasonFalls; Ilina Ewen, @ilinap;Gavin Baker, @GavinBaker

My notes from the "Who should own social media?" session at the Social Media Business Forum

I came in a bit late for this one. When I arrived, Jason was saying it's better to have a person who is active and engaged lead your social media strategy, regardless of what department they're in.

Ilina: You've got to look at how social media fits into your entire strategy, not just look at what you need to do on Twitter.

Jason: I worry about hiring the 20-something right out of college to represent your brand if they don't have an idea of how it ladders up to your strategy. Quite frankly, I was in my early 30s before I understood what tactics meant in relation to an overall strategy. But it's all about the individual. If you can find the right person and they're in their 20s, go for it.

Ilina: Until agencies get social media and figure out how to bill for it, marketing departments that work with those agencies won't get it.

Question: What do you do if your execs think they get it, but really don't?

Jason: You have to keep showing them what they're doing wrong and give them examples. Social media is still on the bottom of the bell curve. We're nowhere close to social media being a big part of business and commerce. We have to keep evangelizing and showing people what's important.

Gavin: People who aren't doing it "right" aren't going to see the results they want. If their goals are a certain number of followers, for instance, they won't get to that. Gavin follows the Pizza Hut "twintern" (who just got hired full-time apparently) and all she does is "tweet marketing speak." Gavin's example: Ruby Tuesday's calls their salad bar a "fresh garden bar." "Do I call it a 'fresh garden bar,' or do I call it a salad bar, because everybody knows what a salad bar is."

Ilina: Pizza Hut's move adds to the perception that social media is a fad. We need to educate people that they need to determine if they if they do indeed need a social media strategy and if so, to explore the best ways to do it.

Question: I'm 24 and I do have experience. How do I overcome that age stigma?

Jason: Show them you know what you're doing and they'll get it.
Ilina: Demonstrate that you understand social media is not just a tactic, but has to be part of a strategy.
Gavin: It's competence, and the ability to push back if necessary. Demonstrate thought leadership, for instance in a blog, outside of just what you do every day.

Question: Will social media be its own department, or are we putting a square peg in a round hole trying to say who should own it?

Jason: Saying "everyone should own social media" is a cop-out. Someone needs to drive the strategy, the training and coordinate the activities. (Amen!)

Ilina: It's like saying "everybody's is responsible for the brand." That's true, but it still should stay in marketing, or at least a department. It's got to be housed somewhere to keep things consistent.

I made a comment that titles like mine (social media manager) may sound like we're trying to tell people what to say in social media, but what we're actually doing is driving the strategy, the policies, the training and communication of social media principles within our organizations. For SAS it puts a stake in the ground that shows social media is important to us. In a few years there might not be a need for a job like mine if I work successfully to integrate social media principles and practices throughout the organization.

Jason: I've told clients in the past that my job is to get them to the point of social media competency that they don't need me anymore.

Question from Ryan Boyles: Marketing can't own social media because you have so many other people in customer-facing roles.

Ilina: Marketing owns the brand and in a smart organization they understand that the brand permeates all the way down to the janitor. We held brand messaging meetings at American Express with people throughout the organization including customer service. The brand drives how you answer the phone, what your sales materials look like, everything. That has to be housed in marketing, not just from a sales perspective but because they will understand the more intricate meaning about your brand.

Gavin: In ten years that's a different question, but right now you need to have somebody who understands it and pushes it forward. You have to start with someone who knows it, and then it will spread across the organization. It will move to training, product development, our executive chefs, etc. It has to sit somewhere and that's marketing for now.

Question: We're all new to social media no matter how long we've been participating, since it's always changing. Tell us about a mistake you made and what you learned.

Jason: When I first got started I did not emphasize search enough, because 85 percent of all transactions on the web start with search. Social media helps with organic search, but every client has as priority one or two optimizing search. I learned that the hard way with some clients. Please make sure that search is at or near the top of your list.

Ilina: One of the key things I flubbed with clients early on was not telling them to listen first, instead of just jumping in. You have to establish rapport first.

Gavin: I'll share a corporate example. Our CEO tweets. I've been at the company since June. In July we raised additional public money to pay down some debt. He tweeted, "I'm in New York and just raised an additional $70 million to strengthen our brand." That tweet violated the FTC's quiet period requirements. It got picked up locally and nationally. We didn't suffer any consequences but we could have. It became my responsibility because it was "my messaging platform." It was one of our biggest mistakes not to make everyone in the loop and know that people would be tweeting.

Question: Clients are looking for agenices that can integrate PR and social media. Should companies outsource to two different agencies?

Jason: It depends on the client competency and need. You need to understand that if people at your agency are going to do social media for you, you need to make them aware of the brand and give them access. What we need to be doing moving forward is training our clients and brands to own social media themselves so they never have to ask that of agencies in the future. Do you trust someone who works at Ford, or someone who works at an agency that works for Ford? I'm always going to go to the root.

Ilina: It's irrelevant to the customer who pushes the buttons. It's fine if an agency needs to handle it while a client gets up to speed and great to integrate with PR, but a client shouldn't assume the kind of risk it would take to hand it over to an agency.

Gavin: Agencies have a hard time because they aren't inside your organization. If they don't know the right people to talk to and to call into the meetings, it's going to be a fail.

I'm in one of the last few sessions at Blogworld. I've hit the point of overload. I truly appreciate all the time and effort all the speakers and organizers have put into making this an incredibly useful and practical event. I love how much people are willing to share. I just looked at today's schedule again and there is honestly not a single session I would not find interesting. It was an embarrassment of riches.

Now to carp a little bit. It's my job to create the strategies for incorporating social media into SAS' marketing and external communications. Most of my job revolves around coordination, training, sharing resources, creating policies and guidelines, and building consensus.

A lot of it involves overcoming objections. Some of those objections are far-fetched and ill-informed. A lot of them are completely legitimate. I can't do anything to advance the cause of social media at SAS unless I can convince everyone that we're doing it the right way.

Stop telling me that no one should own social media in a company and that it must be part of everybody's job starting right now. I agree, but changes like that don't happen overnight, even if everyone agreed it was a good idea.

Stop telling me that everyone in my company should be empowered to talk to anyone about anything whenever they want. That idea still scares the hell out of a lot of people. If I lead off with that, 80 percent of the people I need to influence will stop listening and write me off.

Stop telling me that our CEO and all our top execs must be blogging and tweeting. I would love that, but they're pretty busy right now trying to run the company in a tough economy. Some of the people I've heard this week seem to think I can plop myself down in our top execs' offices whenever I want and preach at them until they're convinced.

I cannot.

And finally, stop arguing about what ROI means. For us it means how much money we spent compared to how much software we sold. No other measure matters to the people I need to influence.

Here are some things I want:

• Show me organizational structures from companies that are doing it well.
  
• Give me case studies, and not the same ones I've heard. I know about Comcastcares and Zappos. And more enterprise and B2B examples, please. I'll share ours when I can.
  
• Show me a flow chart of how to track a tweet to a sale. Or show me how you think it would work.
  
• Show me companies that are using Facebook and LinkedIn really well, and how they set their pages up.
  
• Point me to great training materials that I can use.
  
• Walk me step by step through an example of social media/CRM integration.
  
• Give me real-world examples and statistics to prove that open communication isn't dangerous.
  

I'm ready for the nuts and bolts.

Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group led a fascinating panel at Blogworld today titled "Where Are We Going? The Future of Social Media & Business." As I did yesterday with Chris Brogan's session, I'm posting my tidied-up notes here. This session was without a doubt a call to action for corporate social media practitioners.

Key topics

1. Social is everywhere
2. Corporate websites are irrelevant
3. Real time is not fast enough
4. Customers don't care what department you're in
5. Social personalization - your marketing efforts will be personalized based on your customers social idenity

Where are we now?

Is social for real or is it a fad? When Obama launched his campaign and won, it became a moot point and the question shifted to how do we get started.

Culture impacts the adoption of social technology. It's very heavy in China but they tend to use online forums and anonymous identities, for instance. Some kids in the US have multiple MySpace profiles: a regular profile and a profile for people they don't really like.

Most brands are not engaging effectively. They're falling behind the curve.

Altimeter recently published a survey of companies that are engaging well with their community. Starbucks, Dell, eBay and Google were at the top of the list.

Social is everywhere. Mainstream media sites are incorporating social features.

The next trend to watch is Google Sidewiki. (People in the audience actually booed at the mention.) This is a great opportunity for customers and the brands who are ready to listen. Customers and competitors can leave comments on your Web pages and there's nothing you can do to stop them. It's a browser plugin for IE and Firefox, so it will take some time for mainstream adoption.

If your company is scared about the social web, it's too late. You can't stop it. One audience member replied, "This is like somebody coming to my house and painting it. This is my site!"

Unfortunately the control doesn't belong to us, Jeremiah said. Another audience member replied, "This isn't on your site, it's on my Web."

Google has launched a "stealth social web" with tools like Google Sidewiki, Google Profiles, Google Wave, Google Chat, etc.

You do not control your brand, but at the same time you could control your competitors' brands. You need to change your reaction from fear to seeing the opportunity.

Corporate Websites - Are they irrelevant?

Research shows you trust your friends' opinions more than that of companies and salespeople. These trusted discussions are happening off of your corporate website. You need to join customers where they are: fish where the fish are. Go to Digg, Slashdot, go to where your customers are and join them. One of Intel's goals was not to link to Intel.com, but go to where the customers are. Fragment your website and put it where your customers are, don't try to get them back to your website. Stop measuring based on leads and how many people you bring back to your site.

In the future your product pages will look like a collection of conversations.

Products he mentioned to make sites more social include Echo and Liveworld's Livebar.

My question: How can we convince people within our company that we shouldn't be trying to drive traffic back to the website?

You need to measure success differently, Jeremiah said. The number of friends or fans, the conversations you're involved in, the mentions of your product. Change the way you measure. Think of it in the continuum of a marketing funnel. Frame it in that way. We may not be ready to bring them to the web site yet, but when we're ready, we can bring them in, when they're farther along in the sales cycle.

Real time is not fast enough.

Motrin Moms is an overused example but still has important lessons for us. It started happening on a Friday evening. By Monday it was mainstream. Johnson & Johnson tried to respond over the weekend but it wasn't enough; they didn't respond fast enough.

What can you do? Have a very robust and active listening program and be ready to respond. Only a few hands went up when up when Jeremiah asked how many in the room had a monitoring program, and even fewer when he asked if we had a social crisis response plan.

8 Objectives when listening, from least to most sophisticated:

1. No objective at all
2. Tracking of brand mentions
3. Identifying market risks and opportunities
4. Improving campaign efficiency
5. Meausring support efforts
6. Responding to customer inquiry
7. Better understand customers
8. Being proactive and anticipating customers

Develop an advocacy program. Understand your top customers and build them a platform to do the word of mouth marketing and support for you. Intel Insiders, WamMart Mom Bloggers and Microsoft MVP program are examples.

The key is to be an empowerer. Teach them how to do these things.

Jason Keath asked how this impacts staffing and resources. These things require staffing and funding. But what's the cost or benefit savings you can get out of this? Jeremiah responded that if you can empower thousands of people without paying them, there's a definite ROI. The business case comes in opportunity cost analysis.

Customers don't care what department you're in

Jeremiah used the Maytag/Whirpool/Dooce example where a prominent blogger (Dooce) had a problem with her machine and blogged and tweeted about it. Dooce didn't care if it was a PR, product development, support or other issue. She just wanted her machine fixed.

It's the concept of social CRM: There's a lot of data happening in the social web. CRM companies are mining that data so the right people can respond.

Many of the monitoring solutions in the industry, according to Jeremiah, are building disparate databases that aren't integrated to all areas of the company. You have to connect all areas and get a holistic view of your customers.

Develop a holistic strategy

"It's coming a lot faster than I thought it would." We call it social personalization. People are creating robust profiles on the Web with better information than they're giving you when they sign up for your site, and it's all connected (Twitter, Facebook Connect, etc.) Web sites can now provide a personalized experience based on the customer's ID. Customers can log in via Facebook Connect and not have to fill out the registration page. Registration pages are annoying to many people and probably not accurate. Customers can give companies access to your Facebook profile and choose how much information to give them. The company can provide you with personalized information relevant to you.

An audience member metnioned a legal issue they had encountered: If you log in with a third party tool your visitors aren't explicitly opting in to your privacy policy. How do you get around that?

Jeremiah repsonded that it's going to take a while to work out those issues.

If you use Facebook Connect or other tools, you do not get their email address. Once again you need to change the way that you measure success. Facebook will kick you off if you try to scrape information. One strategy is to have another page where you gather information.

Jeremiah talked about Layar as an example of augmented reality. You can point your smart phone at the Hilton and get information on your phone about what's happening around you, and personalize that information.

Summary

• The social web is quickly evolving. Develop long-term strategies now. Stop playing the one-off games and think about how this is truly changing your business.
  
  
• You need to integrate social technologies into your corporate Web site or Google will render you irrelevant.
  
  
• Join communities where they exist.
  
  
• Develop a listening and advocacy program.
  
  
• Think holistically: this is not just marketing, it's sales and PR and recruting and support.
  
  
• Prepare for personalized content to come to your web sites.
  

Jeremiah's final slide read, "For slides, send an email to info@altimetergroup.com."

Sometimes people don't want to hear that social media takes time and effort. I made this short video after seeing the "social media guru" video on YouTube done with the same tool from Xtranormal. Please note: If I work with you and you see any resemblance to any conversation we've had, this is merely a gross exaggeration to make a point. I am fortunate to work with communicators and marketers who understand the need for a plan.

I got a lot of positive comments on my Four Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media. It reminded me that people are at all different levels of knowledge and interest in social media. When you spend all day thinking about it and using it, it's easy to forget that lots of people still want the basics.

So, here are some basic steps for getting started on Twitter:

What Twitter is good for

• Many of the advantages of blogging in a short, quick format.
• You can support your other communications channels and activities by promoting them on Twitter.
• Hashtags allow you to gain a presence in and around events, conferences and issues.
• Twitter search can show you who’s talking about what.
• It’s still a relatively small community in many professions, allowing you to make connections.

What Twitter is not good for

• Twitter is a tool, not a strategy.
• You have to be interesting to get followers; it’s not the place for heavy-handed sales pitches.
• It’s a firehose, and it’s getting worse. You need filtering tools to find the value (TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Hootsuite).

Getting started on Twitter

• Create an account, using your real name, and set up your profile.
• Use the search function to find people to follow in your industry, and follow who they're following.
• Get to know the standards of the community and the way people use it.
• Think about all the useful and interesting information you encounter every day.
• Start contributing.

Recently I speculated about the future audience I'll be talking with in 20 years. Despite being someone who thinks on a daily basis about communicating as a brand, I think that mindset is on the way out. I don't mean we shouldn't have brand standards and think about how our communications reflect on our company, or try to have consistent messages and useful content. I mean that in 20 years, the idea of a company will be completely different.

My father's generation responded well to the idea of a corporate entity. And no wonder; the military/industrial complex had just defeated the Nazis. What was good for General Motors really was good for America. They still firmly believed you could work for a corporation your entire life and the corporation would take care of you. My generation knows that ideal is nearly gone. My son's generation will probably see it as quaint as dial phones.

Each succeeding generation has responded differently to the idea of corporate perfection. Will future generations respond better to brands, or to people? At the Society for New Communications Research's NewComm Forum, Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu from Clemson gave us the results of her survey of college students and how they relate with brands on Facebook. The gist: "Being friended by a corporation is creepy."

People these days react poorly to "Mistakes were made" and positively to "We screwed up." Why? Because we can relate to other people screwing up, because we've all screwed up. And we can forgive that. Maybe we expect companies to be perfect, but we expect people to be human.

Todays kids won't expect everything to be buttoned down and perfect. The cracks and fissures won't put them off. It's the cracks and fissures that will convince them we are real people they can trust.

(At least about this one thing.)

I wrote this post on a plane to Germany, where I was headed to present at our annual Global Web Summit, where all (or most) of the folks at SAS setting our web direction met to talk about SEO and web analytics and other cool stuff I should know more about. They also said they wanted to talk about our social media strategy, and that's where I came in.

I set my new netbook up to use Google Reader offline with Google Gears, in an attempt to whittle away at that “1000+” unread posts notice that shows up whenever I open it. That's why I was late getting to the post where Chris Brogan, reigning social media marketing rock star, called me a doofus.

Well, not me specifically, nor did he use the word “doofus,” but he asks why anybody would want the title Social Media Manager.

"What are people doing taking titles like 'Social Media Manager?' To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool."

He thinks people in jobs like mine should use the titles that already exist in the PR and marketing departments.

It made me think, hard actually, and not just because I've become a slavering Brogan fanboy after meeting him in San Francisco.

I debated that title for a long time. I've only had the job for about seven months, and when I started, the backlash against self-proclaimed social media experts was well under way. I think of what I do, what I've been doing for the last 20 years or so, as marketing communications. In other companies I've had titles like Marketing Communications Manager and Product Marketing Manager and Director of Web Sales and Marketing.

I firmly believe that social media are an element of marketing communications. They provide new tools to include in your mix, to support your established marketing goals and objectives. That's the way I've been talking about social media to folks at SAS. I suppose I could have chosen Marketing Communications Manager.

But putting “Social Media Manager” on my (now hideously quaint) business cards sends a message that SAS is making social media a priority. “We have a social media manager. We are dedicating time and resources to this, because we think it's important.”

But it's not just a perception thing. My job is as inward-facing as it is outward. I'm not creating social media marketing campaigns for individual groups and products; I'm working with the marketers and the sales folks and the communicators to help them understand which social media tools might help them meet their established objectives.

I'm also trying to collect and disseminate best practices so that we can learn from one another. And I'm trying to perform a coordination function, so that we all know what one another is doing, and we don't duplicate efforts, or worse, contradict ourselves.

So, I'm managing how we use social media. Make sense?

Right now my title might sound odd to people on the cutting edge, but it sounds pretty forward-looking to the people I most need to influence. By the time it starts sounding odd to them, I'll probably be out of business cards anyway. Plus, I've been saying since before I got the job that if I do it right, I will eventually make my current position irrelevant.

What do you think? Is Social Media Manager a red flag, or a green light?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/reallynuts/ / CC BY 2.0

Abhisek Sarda