Social Sharing

I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion yesterday at "The Social Consumer" Conference held by BDI here in New York.  The topic that the organizers asked me to lead was all about how to organize your teams to create social media success.  Not the sexiest of topics, granted, but timely enough for sure.

What I quickly learned from the conference, however, was not really about how to organize teams but more about how to share information.  I always say that marketing is a spectator sport, and we can learn so much by watching each other's activities.  And that was really what the discussion ended up being all about.   Sharing, and team work.  I guess marketing is a team sport as well.

Social media is new to us all ... none of us can really say that we are expert in something so new that changes so frequently.  So all we can really do is learn from each initiative and apply it to the next.  The conference attendees were so eager to share and to learn and to talk freely about the challenges they face in developing social media programs.

It was refreshing to say the least because I would say that ten years ago marketers were much more reluctant to share information.  We worried more about proprietary thoughts and our ideas being "stolen."  With social media it doesn't really matter anymore because things move at lightening speed ... at the speed of life as they say.  So we have no choice but to share just to keep up.  Keeping things close to the vest generally means being out of the loop.  Sure we have to hold our brand assets as confidential, but it's nice to share our experiences and to learn from them with each other.

So while we started out by talking about how to organize our teams, we ended up just sharing and talking about how we can share better, which is an internal organizational issue as well.  Social sharing ... a topic well worth the price of admission.

What's your experience?  Jim.

Jim Joseph
President, Cohn & Wolfe North America
Author, The Experience Effect and The Experience Effect for Small Business
Professor, NYU