Notorious R.O.B.

Today, we will cover Twitter techniques of the 21st century Europe

One of the most interesting threads of 2009 sort of blew up this past week over at Marc Davison’s place when he posted a heartfelt mea culpa about his past cynicism about social media.  Various heavy-hitter commenters came by and a full blown debate erupted.  Oh, it’s good stuff!

But there was one topic within those dozens of comments that I think deserves a bit more examination, and as I don’t want to hijack Marc’s thread, I thought I’d talk about it here on Notorious.

I’ll admit to starting it, since I asked in the comments:

I’m extremely torn on this “reason to provide courses and education” on Social Media… since the core essence of social media is to be yourself. You need lessons for that?

And Bill Lublin of SMMI (who incidentally personifies the word mensch) responded:

@Rob: People can always benefit from training that teaches them how to more clearly communicate – too many messages don’t have the intended impact or result – and that’s part of what our training does. We spend a really long time on some theory because we believe that while McLuhan was right about the medium being the message, the medium is not the purpose – the message is, and working on how to deliver the message better is important. You’re an amazingly articulate man, and perhaps from that perspective its hard to realize how much goes unsaid, or is misspoken by well intentioned people. Because of the differences in the “psychological bandwidth” of the various SM tools, it gets even a little more complicated and frankly there are a huge number of people that create unintended consequences. I agree with you that a lot of SM information is not applicable to every situation but that doesn’t dismiss the need for people to reach a level of ‘conscious competency’ in their SM interactions so that the response they actually engender is the response they intended. But so far, our students have responded really well to the course material and presentation – and as I said earlier in this too lengthy response, I think it makes them better at communicating outside SM as well. [Emphasis mine]

Bill always makes me think, which may be a dangerous thing actually…, but it’s a good thing. And here’s where my thinking leads me.

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What do you mean these Fireside Chats aren't enough? Fireside Tweets is undignified man!

Back when Todd Carpenter was applying for the position of Social Media Manager at the National Association of REALTORS, I endorsed him with reservations. Those reservations had nothing to do with Todd, as he was (and is) perhaps the most qualified person to head up social media strategy for NAR.  When he got the position, I was extremely happy for him personally, but concerned about a few implications of what “going corporate” would mean for Todd and for NAR.  I wrote about those here, and made a couple of recommendations.

Fast forward to last week, when an absolute blogstorm erupted over the issue of NAR endorsement of a local MLS rule forcing members to block Google from indexing IDX listings on their websites.  Some of the responses of people on that thread were extraordinarily interesting from a social media strategy standpoint.  The substance of the issue in that post is addressed there and elsewhere.  The focus of this post is on the process of deploying social media strategies for large organizations, particularly when the organization brings in a well-known figure in the wider community.

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