Today, a guest post and a punch of humor from our regular-ish reality check correspondent, Matt Ridings.

I realize this isn’t one of those posts that everyone will agree with. That’s fine, we’re all wrong sometimes, and this time it might as well be you.

In all seriousness though, there’s been a rash of Social Media Mission Statements floating around lately…or more accurately, a rash of posts about why you must have one (google it). Frankly, I don’t get it. Why do we need a mission statement for social media at all? Do we have a mission statement for all of our sub-functions? A copier mission statement? A email mission statement?

Policies? OK, I buy that. Value Statements? I suppose, but shouldn’t they just be the corporations values? Why would they be specific to social media?

Ok, ok. Let’s say I’m wrong. I’ll allow for that possibility, it could happen. But if that’s the case can we please at least create mission statements that actually mean something? The buzzword-laden jargon that I’m reading out there (yes, I’m looking at you) means nothing, says nothing, conveys nothing, and is completely and utterly useless. I know it, and you know it. Most of the ones floating around out there are about as useless as a back pocket on a shirt, so please stop pee’ing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

“We will work together in the social space to utilize value-added experiences with available resources for the benefit of our consumers and other interested parties “

No. We won’t. What does that even mean?

“Our vision is to engineer dynamic social experiences with maximum improvement for the benefit of our clients and other public bodies”

What? Is the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator* still in use somewhere and nobody told me?

I’m all for anything that rallies people around a common set of values and objectives that they can then measure their activities against. But don’t kid yourself that a social media mission statement will accomplish that. Quick, tell me what your companies mission statement says.

Exactly. There are better ways.

I don’t particularly care for most corporate mission statements, much less a ‘Social Media” Mission Statement. But at least corporate ones can have some external PR value when done correctly. However, if you truly feel that there’s no way your social media team could possibly move forward without its very own to love and take care of then I’ll make it easy for you.

The mission of [company name] is to [adjective] and churn out [adjective] words. [proper name] is [verb ending in "ing"] our time by holding meetings on these useless mission statement exercises. When instead we could be talking about real examples of [company name]‘s values and translating them into how we want to act and be perceived. Why we let go of [proper name] and kept [proper name] I’ll never [verb ending in "ing"] understand. On top of that we brought [proper name] on board and the results have been [adjective]. [expletive]! What we need to do is start with the [noun] then [verb] [proper name] and get someone who can [verb] [noun]. Then we will be able to [verb] some [expletive] sales. This Social Media Mission Statement [noun] makes me want to [verb]. I’d like to [verb] [name] in the [body part]!

Here’s the part where you come in.

First, if you think there really is a purpose for a social media mission statement that couldn’t be better served through some other means then please tell me. It’s possible. I have no doubt that there are some great points of view out there and I’d love to hear yours (I’m being serious about that by the way). All I ask is that you don’t try and make a ‘mission statement’ all of a sudden have a different meaning than it always has.

Second, PLEASE fill out the Mad Lib above and put your version into the comments below. Why? Because it’s funny, that’s why. I’m easily entertained.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings – @techguerilla

*Yes, there used to a Dilbert Mission Statement Generator on the web. To my knowledge it no longer exists. If you know different please point me to it and I’ll link it here.

awesome cartoon courtesy of Tom Fishburne

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Mad Libs and Social Media Mission Statements

Rightfully, we’re celebrating companies that are doing an outstanding job with social media education, and building internal teams that have the goods on what social media means, and how it’s driving business. Agencies and consultancies are getting smarter and more valuable when they can bring not just the mechanics of social to the fore, but the ability to wire it into other areas of the organization.

These are incredibly valuable things. And having a social media Center of Excellence or the like is definitely something to aspire to.

But don’t forget something critical:

The Center of Excellence can be your resource, but it can easily become the crutch.

And if it becomes the latter, you simply can’t scale it to meet the needs of your business overall.

You may never make a social media professional out of a sales person, or really get the HR folks to love and embrace social media’s potential like your core team would. But the goal needs to be to infuse a basic level of business consideration for those people in their day to day jobs.

We may never love accounting, but we have to learn the value of budgets and fiscal responsibility. We may never be compelling copywriters, but knowing the value of story-based advertising is something that anyone in the company can grasp. They may never know or embrace social at the depth that you do, but they need to be able to integrate it well enough into their own work to function and make some 101-level decisions and actions.

Our jobs as social media professionals is to be the teachers, to set direction, to stay at the leading edge and to do our best to curate and disseminate the knowledge so that others access it and absorb it in a multitude of ways and continually improve what they know. But we are doing our companies a disservice if we stop once we’ve assembled a team of smart social media people and then expect them to shoulder the burden of solving all of the social-media related problems. We’ll create a dependency and a bottleneck that will forever be impossible to get past, which is undoing the very thing we’re hoping to enable: communication and business with less friction.

Learn what pieces of social media are functionally important for people’s roles, pieces that can make their work lives easier, and make it a priority to teach those pieces to everyone. Let your COE be the level up, the core, the innovative, the people that can afford to make social media a focus rather than a component of their work and lead the charge to bring things to another level.

Know that your social media hub is a large node on the company network, but a node nonetheless. Specialists will always have a role, but better and more enthusiastic generalists armed with core social media knowledge from the center will power the businesses that continue to thrive tomorrow.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
When a Social Media Center of Excellence Can Hurt You

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine de Ste. Exupery

There was a time when I cared a lot about making sure I wrote on a schedule.

I’ll tell you, along with eleventy-thousand other writing experts, that if you aspire to write, you need to do it often. That’s truth. And the truth is that I write all the time. I just don’t always publish things.

I write ideas. I write snippets of things. I write down lots and lots of questions, and a bunch of meandering prose that’s nonsensical and messy and is designed to work through the smog in my head and find some clarity on the other side. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. But it’s always writing.

Garbage Out

Publishing regularly – about three times per week, around these parts – has a few benefits.

It keeps you  in front of people’s eyeballs, and by process of elimination, probably means that you’re closer to “top of mind” with people when you’re not talking directly with them. Or something. (If I ran ads on this blog, that might matter more to me).

It keeps blog traffic at a more consistent level over time, which is just a number. Those stats drive things like lists and rankings sometimes, and there was a time when I cared more about those things than I do now. And I don’t begrudge the people that DO care about those things, because they look pretty on a resume and I’m sure have intrinsic value. I’m just making a choice not to chase them. No, that doesn’t make me better. As a matter of fact, by most standards for the blogging elite, that makes me pretty much a rank amateur. But it’s a choice. And a conscious one.

What’s come to worry me more is publishing garbage. A lot of the posts I’ve started and stopped lately haven’t made me excited. They feel like I’m about to say the same thing in new clothing. And for the love of all that’s holy, that is not what I started this blog for. I read a lot of garbage. Good writing, even, wrapped around incredibly stale topics and uninteresting ideas (to my tastes, anyway). I never want to be a slave to the “publish” button in favor of publishing garbage. Ever.

One Person’s Commitment

One person specifically called me out recently saying that they heard me say I was redoubling my commitment to my blog, but that my posting schedule doesn’t show that. But if frequency of publication is the only indication that I’m devoted to my blog, we really have some messed up ideas about what “commitment” means.

By making a conscious choice to ride the waves of inspiration, in my mind, I am making a stronger commitment to this blog, in order to publish the things that move me, and also hopefully push my audience into thinking something more than “great post!”. My commitment is about publishing something I’m proud of, or that is making me think. Nothing less.

As for being engaged and connected in the social media world, I’d like to think that my own writing is but one of the ways I contribute to the community around me.

Sometimes it’s content, sure. Other times it’s conversation. Or making someone laugh. Maybe it’s shining the spotlight on someone else’s work and sharing things I’ve found interesting or inspirational.

Or maybe – just maybe – once in a while it’s simply shutting up and listening, taking in the world around me and giving myself the time to process it. Which leads me to something else. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and that my friend and intellectual foil Matt Ridings really shoved into my consciousness the other day over lunch.

What We Don’t Know Won’t Kill Us

There are a lot of questions out here. Questions we don’t have the answers to.

Why the hell are we in such a desperate hurry to find them?

One of the things I’ve always loved about astronomy, physics, and things like that is that the professionals in that world contemplate the same questions for years and years sometimes before an answer even begins to hint that it exists. The entire world they live in is about the pursuit of just a little bit more knowledge, something that takes them closer. They revel in the questions, and are incredibly comfortable working within the unknown in order to make it known.

We suck at this. We, meaning the business types, especially those that are fond of the social business approach. We grapple for our case studies and our proof points and our best practices because we are nearly incapable of sitting in the midst of something, realizing we don’t understand it, and making our goal about the exploration to understand it better.

It’s truly something to be moved by an idea, but not be completely able to articulate it. To tinker with words or thoughts, move them around, look at them from different perspectives. Let them sit on the desk – either literally or figuratively – and let them have some real estate in the pensive part of our brains.

I think we’re experiencing that now, and it makes us incredibly uncomfortable. This is a good thing.

Our Quest

We feel the seismic shifts easily enough, but it’s the incremental ones that are really fascinating to me. The subtle changes in the kinds of people that are embracing, adapting to, and thriving in this new era. The attitudes that are emerging as new, or reinforcements of age-old concepts that we have let gather dust and whose elegance we’re now appreciating all over again.

We can point to things and call them “social”, but ask one of us why they’re social or what makes them that way, and we’re just not graceful with our answers yet.

But we are in the midst of a beautiful, exciting, riveting time. We have the opportunity to rethink the very foundations of what we’ve always done and why we’ve done them. You and I? We are the architects, the engineers, the designers, the bricklayers, yes. But more importantly, we are the explorers that have heads full of questions, looking at some of the changes in the world around us and not quite understanding them completely yet.

By all means, build, create, and share what you know. But above all? Be wayfinders. We need you, your inspiration, your curiosity, your quest for answers…and your comfort in their absence.

Because this sea we now travel is vast and endless indeed.

image credit: aclearn

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Our Era Of Wayfinding