The Social Media Mindset

Post by: Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies

Paul Chaney of MarketingProfs has an excellent blog post entitled “Seven Social Media Mindset Markers.” He points out that many marketers – and, I would add communicators and PR people – have adopted social media tools without understanding the philosophy of social media.

The world is a different place because of online communication. We have struggled in finding the right “name” for social media – online communication, interactive PR, digital communication…it’s a challenge because by naming it something other than “communication,” we isolate it from traditional or classic communication, and that shouldn’t happen.

One of the key points I took away from the Ragan Social Media Conference in Vegas is that social media is today, it’s now, it’s a reality and that we have to stop thinking of it as this new, different “thing” or tool. It is a part of how the world connects and we need to embrace that communication has changed forever.

Having said that, in speaking with communicators, I often hear of the challenges that they face in convincing their senior executive or board of directors that social media is of value. There is a paradigm shift that needs to happen at organizations. At the core of this shift is the impact of social media on how we do business. I believe this is exactly what Chaney speaks about in this blog post. It is imperative that we change how we think about the way we communicate before we use social media tools.