Blocking And Tackling In The Word Of Mouth Economy

December 30th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

blocking tackling“Social media experts” are the vanguard of the new way brands have to manage and leverage the web’s new social media ecosystem. We are making the switch from a broadcast one-to-many medium to a many-to-few word of mouth economy where conversational critical mass has an equal voice to traditional media. We see this trend manifested in restaurateurs rants about Yelp, Digg buttons, and the small band of mommy bloggers that brought Motrin to their knees.

These experts (Bublicious has a list) have eagerly dived into every new social media site, looking for ways to spread their message. Over time, they refine the services and methods that work. Over time, the process of conversation becomes proceduralized.

Like in Peter Kim’s great roundup of social media predictions, I imagine 2009 will be filled with even more productization of social media. A lot of this will come in the form of training a new cadre of social media professionals to pick up where the vanguard left off. While technology will play a large roll in this productization, people will play an equally important role. I totally agree with Todd Deferen’s assessment that “the “best” case studies of Social Media in action, to date, are marked by the introduction of “real” human beings into the customer conversation.”

However, the future will not be ruled by social media rockstars, but rather social media “linemen” who can do the day to day blocking and tackling to push to overall strategy forward. Jeremiah Owyang’s community manager is too passive a title for my taste.

Social media linemen are a mix of customer service and marketing. They’re both reactive and active participants in conversations about your brand. Customers can seek them out when problems arise and they will seek out customers to encourage positive word of mouth messaging.

Here’s a short job description:

Social Media Lineman:

A social media lineman manages relationships with customers through the use of social media. Responsibilities include:

    • Responding to customer support issues
    • Discovering and responding to customer conversations within social media properties
    • Developing and maintaining social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)
    • Crafting Shareable messages that project the company’s core values

Skill should include:

    • Superior writing ability
    • Listening skills
    • Ability to entertain and inform
    • Familiarity with major social media platforms
    • Familiarity with searching and filtering social media

The process:

Social media linemen go through a daily process of:

  1. Managing and growing the social media footprint
  2. Responding to inbound messages
  3. Discovering relevant conversations
  4. Tapping influencers
  5. Creating conversation
  6. Repeat

Here are some of the tools:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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