Social media professionals

It is Journalism Week this week at WVU and I was lucky enough to be able to experience two of the speakers that were brought in to share their stories. The first speaker whose lecture I was able to attend was the social media director of the American Red Cross. As I have mentioned frequently throughout the course of this blog, a future career that involves utilizing social media marketing and PR is something I'm extremely interested in. I was very excited to hear her story and to learn something from her.

One of the main things that I took away from listening to her speak for around an hour was that it can sometimes be a very big struggle to get people to believe in the power of social media. She said that when she was hired by the American Red Cross, her initial task was to silence the bloggers. Around the time she was hired in 2006, bloggers were mentioning the American Red Cross around 400 times a day and most mentions were extremely positive. When she found these things out, it became her task to convince her supervisors that it would do no good to try to take down the bloggers, so they should instead work with them. She went on to say that, initially, everyone she approached within the organization was unconvinced about the usefulness and effectiveness of social media. In order to prove that social media could work for the American Red Cross, she wound up purchasing a professional blog with her own money. Eventually, the organization began to fund the blog on their own and they now even feature it on the homepage of their main website.

The one thing that sticks out to me about social media is the need to be persistent. I've previously talked about the need to be persistent with social media when you're attempting to utilize it within a company or and organization, but it's just as important to be persistent when attempting to convince others within your company or your organization to be more open-minded about embracing social media instead of attempting to silence it.