What Does A Social Media Manager Do…?

“The best leaders… almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.”
Tom Peters

The above just got sent out to the 100 or so employees of CORE Education as an attempt to introduce their new social media manager and my approach to the role (YouTube version).

Like any newbie I’ve been busy for the past month acting like a sponge, taking it all in, finding out who’s who, where are the opportunities, the needs, the toilets, and stuff like that. Now it’s time to earn my wage.

This morning I presented the above to the exec team along with other initial ideas of social media adoption, exploration and management. One of the things they agreed was allowing me to share on this blog the whole development and implementation phases of what I’m doing here, the likes of which will include :

• baselining—creating a clear benchmark plus track and review process of social media activity and its impact relative to the overall aims and goals (quantifiably and qualitatively plus some other big words)
• gamified training—skilling up the employees in a funky, systematic way (using game theory as a model)
• ambassadorial networks—finding and establishing champions and creating hubs of knowledge around them (especially relevant as our colleagues work nationally across nearly 30 different geographical locations)
• creating a social permaculture—basically working myself out of a job in the next two years whilst ensuring sustainability
• productising our approach—hoping to transfer the learning and successes across to MediaSnackers at some point to package and sell on further

Over the coming months this is what will appear here and would love to hear from you, especially if you’re a new or established social media manager, head of digital content, director of educational technologies, online communication leads, chief bloggers etc. on your approach, pitfalls, mistakes and successes. Does the above sound like a good ‘start’?

Big thanks to the picture takers : plindberg, cousinali, vatobob, jb-london, x-ray_delta_one, kurtxio, azrainman, andrewmorrell, simonehudson, melissaadret, redroom, rosauraochoa, neilrickards, olpc, dantaylor, torley, birgerking, _fabrizio_, booleansplit, 40006794@N02, 94801434@N00, findyoursearch, markwalker, pip_r_lagenta, ref, gareth1953, jaako, 25023895@N02, ryanr, bossco, chrisdlugosz.