(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 1 - You

Go to Part 0, Part 2

When your organization mounts a social media campaign or launches a social media strategy, who should care about it?

It depends.

Think of the terms "important," "very important," and "extremely important." You could say that something is "important" to you, but at the end of the day, that something becomes meaningless. Perhaps a CEO says that "social media is important to our company," and then five minutes later the CEO is on a conference call about something else.

"Very important" things obviously take more of your time; when I was a product manager, I ignored all of the "important" feature requests and tried to see how many "very important" feature requests could be accommodated.

Unless you are absolutely without a life, the term "extremely important" never enters into a discussion of social media, or any business endeavor. One day I was in a meeting at work - I think it was a "very important" one. During the meeting, I received a phone call and immediately left the meeting and left the office. My brother in law had just died. That's "extremely important."

If you are charged with day-to-day responsibilities for a social media campaign or strategy, then it's very important to you. This is true even if your CEO has declared the importance of social media to the company; the CEO's not going to spend 3, or 6, or 10 hours a day working in social media. This is true even if your organization has a seven-step approval process before something can be tweeted; again, the approvers aren't going to invest the time in it.

You are.