Navigating the Social Media Landscape

“Social Media” is a squishy topic to a lot of people, and particularly to decision makers within many organizations. The gurus seem to know what they are talking about — mostly — but even the concept of “social media expert” is riddled with fallacy. The problem, as I see it, is that social media has risen so far, so fast, to become a marketing, communications, and organizational priority, and there have been a great number of moderately savvy folks that have benefited from passing themselves off as “experts” along the way. It’s not necessarily these peoples’ fault: while most of us can Facebook with the best of ’em, a great number of organizations simply lack the in-house expertise to make sense of social media from a mission perspective, also know as, “how do we derive real business or organizational value from these services?” It’s a tough challenge to find true experts in a field that is only a few years old.

I was therefore quite pleased yesterday when my friend, Erin Zagursky, sent me a link to “A CMO’s Guide To The Social Media Landscape“, a great article from CMO.com (Erin works in communications, University Relations at The College of William and Mary to be specific, so she should know a good article when she sees one – thanks, Erin). I really wish that I had a copy of this article and the really nice chart that accompanies it when I discussed social media with a group over lunch a few weeks ago; the chart (as published by the apparently quite insightful folks at 97th Floor) is really great.