Sometimes a blog post gets to me. it creeps under my guard and impresses me so much I feel like commenting. When there are already comments there, I feel I’m joining in a conversation…
Here’s the blog that set me off… “Fire Your Director of Social Media” by Paul Dunay. Paul interviewed Brian Wallace VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM. This is what I said in my comment.
“Greetings to you all from Cork Ireland, where I’m considering all your points.
I found you via Twitter, but while reading your post and comments my tweetstream moved on, and I can’t remember who gave me the link. [Isn't that the world we live in! Ideas, inspirations fly in for somewhere, and you easily lose track of where they began.]
The word that came to me was “Catalyst” – certainly not “co-ordinator”. I found the view that “it’s also good to have that one person who mulls through everyone’s content and lightly sculpts it into the company’s trademark voice” wonderful. Horrific really. No way could you do anything valuable by developing such a voice, I’d say.
What’s needed …
… I submit is diverse voices, a multitude of voices, all of which smell different – as if they truly came from individuals. The crowd outside your organisation is suspicious. We expect bull. We expect your company voice to lie, over-promise, under-deliver. Our starting point is scepticism. You have your work cut out to grow a garden of flowering voices within the business. But it’s worth striving for.
I suggest…
… you’ll have a hard time if you stay within the notion of developing within. It’s in the meeting of the internal folk with external customers, stakeholders, suppliers, and lurkers that hope lies. Use the outsiders to develop your insiders. Cultivate the external as much as you cultivate the internal staff for all departments.
Enough. Never meant to go on and on. Probably repeating myself. But thanks. It’s fun to be sparked off.”
This experience fits into a project I’m working on. So it was good to clarify a few thoughts. What do you think?
