Green Tea Ice Cream

A series of posts on Nancy White’s blog set me thinking about the role we’re introducing to help deal with the mushrooming quantities of social media related activities around our organization. Nancy writes about the tension between the idea of having a community manager whose job it is to facilitate open-ended discussions and happy accidents (I’m very, very loosely paraphrasing here - in fact, that’s probably nothing like what she originally wrote. So go read the original). Her other posts in this series look at the job description and skill set for such a role in more detail - all stuff I wish I’d had two months ago

It’s something that I’ve been worried about in recruiting for a vacant information role. It was originally a library based role but we’ve re-tooled the job to focus at least 50% of the time around our social media interactions, inside and outside. In fact, a lot of the components and competencies on the job description mirror those on Chris Brogan’s post of a couple of days ago. Their main internal job will be to train everyone to represent us in a social media context - to facilitate everyone else’s (micro-)community building efforts. I really don’t see social media as a technical issue, in terms of embedding it into the organisation as an everyday state of affairs but as one of attitude. The technical side of it (apart from the need to be able to type) can be learned but the core of it is quite literally a different style of life, an inner change of some kind. We make no attempt to regulate interactions with students offline (though the default nature of those interactions is another issue altogether) beyond an expected level of professionalism so why even contemplate regulating online conversations to any greater extent?

Anyway, borderline metaphysics aside, what do I hope for? At a guess, we have fifty or sixty ongoing activities at a time, all potentially overlapping and interrelating. Pull those activities and their owners into a social media context and you’ve got a chance of turning those potential synergies into something actual, meaningful and unpredictable. It’s probably a recipe for complete chaos, though I rather like chaos. Either way, the first step is to make everyone a potential community manager, provided its understood that “manager” operates precisely after Lao Tzu - by not interfering one iota and letting the ten thousand things run where they will.

Meanwhile, Chris’s post has bought a whole load more of “community manager” recruitment activity out of the woodwork, most of which seems to suggest that we’re more or less on the right track.