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Over the past couple of years, an entirely new kind of executive has begun to appear in the upper echelons of US corporations: the social media strategist. Some 200 major US businesses now employ such a person.
If you want to understand why, just look at what befell Sarah Palin last week. She's not a corporation exactly, but her recent adventures in social media have been salutary - showing why engaging with people online can be such a double-edged sword.
Since emerging on the national scene, Palin has used social media like Twitter and Facebook to rally her core supporters, with a fair degree of success. But then she got embroiled in the aftermath of the horrific shooting of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona earlier this month.
Palin's first mistake was to allow an employee to claim on the day of the shooting that a poster her campaign created last year and which featured gun sights superimposed on locations where she hoped to help defeat Democrat incumbents in fact depicted "surveyor's marks".
That explanation was quickly de-bunked when journalists found an old tweet of Palin's referring to the map as featuring "bull's-eyes", leaving Team Sarah to appear either shiftless or guilt-ridden. Next, more than 350,000 people raced to US expat Karin Robinson's ObamaLondon blog to read how negative comments on Palin's Facebook page were being erased in almost real time - but not before Robinson was able to copy the original posts and share them with the world.
Then, last Wednesday, Palin posted a video to Facebook defending herself from accusations of inciting political violence and accusing her detractors of perpetrating a "blood libel" against her - a term widely construed as being either shockingly ignorant or grossly insensitive, or both.
It added up to a nightmare week for the possible 2012 presidential candidate - and should give pause to anyone concerned with their online reputations.
Most US corporations, of course, care very much about their reputations and many will be thankful to feel at least a step ahead of Palin when it comes to managing their presences in the complex new social media world.
But they are only a small step ahead. The confluence of social media with the long memories of online search engines has dramatically altered how national conversations about politics, or products - or oil spills - now run. So it's hardly surprising that the people whom companies have been hiring to try to influence such conversations are making up a lot of what they are doing as they go along.
Among the challenges they face is the potential for anything anyone said months or even years ago to return and haunt the speaker. It used to be that your critics had to keep archives of the right press clippings or spend a lot of time in a video library to find material relevant to their cause. Not so today. It's never been easier to "prove" someone's hypocrisy by exposing inconsistencies between what they say now and their comments in the past.
Tweets, meanwhile, can seem ephemeral, but once sent are all but impossible to repress. And, as Karin Robinson deftly illustrated last week, Facebook comments are tricky to edit quietly when you suddenly start getting trashed for something you've done.
In the wake of Palin's (and others') mass online editing following the Tucson shooting, CBS Business writer Erik Sherman wrote: "Executives need to understand that social media isn't a trivial plaything to be used on a whim. They need strategy as well as tactics, and the tools and sophisticated business processes to control them."
Establishing such a strategy is the corporate Social Media Strategist's main job. Distinct from traditional roles in marketing, advertising or corporate communications, the position also requires a comprehensive understanding of how social media change the overall media equation for businesses, an ability to prevent everyone from senior executives to low-level employees from blogging or tweeting things they (or the company) will one day regret, and the foresight to know what those things might be.
Many such strategists also run their company's corporate blog and Twitter feed. That makes them public figures in the way that only CEOs or paid celebrity endorsers used to be. Take Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford, for instance. He has nearly 50,000 followers on Twitter.
"This role will become pervasive in the coming years, just as leaders who manage the corporate website have become essential," believes Jeremiah Owyang, a technical analyst who began noting corporate hiring in social media back in 2007 and has been tracking it ever since.
While it can easily pay a cool $150,000 (£94,500) salary, Owyang calls the job of social media strategist "deceptively challenging". That's partly because corporate leaders are often clueless about what the job actually entails or why they need to listen to the person occupying it.
It's also hard to measure the value such positions add - at least until you have a full-scale social media brand disaster on your hands.
Many hired into these roles are online marketing experts. And yet "most social strategists and their programmes lack maturity", concludes Owyang in a recent report. To succeed, they'll need be highly strategic in their thinking, he writes, or risk relegation to "the social media help desk".
The repercussions for their employers can be worse. A brand disaster is pretty much how you could describe Palin's recent online experience - a performance variously described as poorly-timed, tone-deaf, offensive, shameless, self-pitying, and anti-semitic. Others have speculated that her actions were calculatedly divisive. But companies would be wiser to view Palin's as a textbook case of what not to do - and hire themselves a social media strategist quick.
Reader views (7)
Ah Denise - you may be right about Palin's suitability as a presidential candidate, who knows. My point has always been that everything that is written about her contains an inbuilt bias bordering on hysterics. The utter tripe that has been published, then repeated ad nauseum is unprecedented in the history of adversarial politics, and has been so since the moment her name was mentioned - long before anyone was able to make a reasoned assessment of her personal politics.
Just for the record, if they disagree with YOUR politics, that doesn't make them spawn of the devil, nor any other darkly malevolent force - they are simply part of politics. You know, people exercising their right to an opinion; their right to choose someone's opinion other than a glib speaker with a highly vociferous mob shouting down anyone who disagrees. You know, "democracy".
I don't decry others choosing Obama or his lot, though I do not hesitate to say that I disagree with his politics. I do take exception to those supporters telling me that I have no right to an opinion, however (no matter how they word that denial).
People from the centre and the right of American politics increasingly see Obama and the Democrats as introducing re-labeled socialism to the USA - socialism that has been seen to have failed at the national and international level everywhere it is and has been in force. The only people who appear to disagree are socialists themselves. One party state anyone?
- Rogan, Irving, 18/01/2011 03:07
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Jimmy, Camden London - you obviously don't actually read the comments, do you. I sneer at no one. I will highlight something I see as wrong - but I invariably explain WHY I think it wrong.
As for anonymity? I've probably posted more information about myself than anyone on this site, so try again. I'm unimpressed (then again you are probably at least as impressed as I am - fair enough. I can live with that. You, obviously, can't. Tough).
- Rogan, Irving, 18/01/2011 02:50
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Rogan, Irvin,
And you would never dream of doing some social bullying from the anonymous safety of your computer, would you Rogan?
Hardly a day goes by without you sneering and spitting venom at anyone remotely to the left of the anonymous far right Mr Irving.
{Social networks are playgrounds for bullying mentalities}
You should know Rogan. Pots & Kettles etc etc.
- Jimmy, Camden London, 17/01/2011 21:02
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warren, get your head out of the sand. the media does not attack palin, palin attacks the media and everybody else. if she thinks the media mistreats her, then she could settle the whole issue by sitting down and giving a interview in which ALL media outlets are allowed to speak to her. but no, palin avoids every media outlet except FOX NEWS, because she knows they will ask her easy questions with no requisite push back.
palin is just as terrible of a presidential choice as she was a vp nominee. her speech last week sealed her fate. instead of addressing the horror of the shooting in tuscon, she gives a speech that focused on me, me, me,me, me. nothing about the victims. no sympathy whatsoever.
president obama knocked it out of the ballpark. we don't need white, trailer park trash in the white house with the intellect of a granola who thinks with a gun, always has gloomy messages and wants to divide the country, and thinks n. korea is our ally and lies everytime she opens our mouth
- Denise, louisville, usa, 17/01/2011 18:51
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Never before has an American citizen come under such vile, vicious, iniquitous attacks. The main stream, liberal media continues to try to destroy her. The reason for this is that they are afraid of Sarah Palin. She is a threat to the socialist,progressive agenda that the Obama administration and establishment insiders propagate. The fact is that they hate the very principles, values and morals that millions of Americans cherish and hold closely.
- Warren Zimmerman, Biloxi, Mississippi USA, 17/01/2011 17:58
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“social media manager” – isn’t that what people with a brain in companies slightly more up to date than using quill pens call corporate PR ?
- Lord Hingebottom, Hingebottom Bay, UK, 17/01/2011 17:30
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You mention the gaffs from the Palin camp, but pointedly ignore the unrelenting campaign of innuendo, perpetuation of misdirections & blatant lies she has had to endure since moment dot when she came onto the political radar. All through the social networking system.
The 'blood libel' outrage is an excellent example of a created storm against the woman. It is a term that's come to mean false accusation & is in use today. Yet as soon as SHE came out with it it was traced to it's origins & the left leaning media went straight to the very vociferous & aggressively defensive lobby concerned who attack anti-semetism in every shape or form, and asked them their opinion. They responded to it's original use when it did refer to an attack on Judaism. Trouble is that its modern use is not exclusive to that religion. Social network attack dogs weren't worried by that though, they just took it & ran with it. Instant controversy. A created lie, ultimately.
The same people fanning these flames are the ones who started fabricating stories about the woman within fifteen minutes of her being named as a vice-presidential candidate, taking everything she says, dissecting it in its most literal terms (seeing Russia from where she lives, for instance) & sneering at her and those NOT disposed to automatically dislike the woman as intellectually inept and much else besides - all from the anonymous safety of their computer screens.
Social networks are a playground for bullying mentalities.
- Rogan, Irving, 17/01/2011 15:58
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