Wanted: A social media expert?!

Guest Post by Kate Nelson(@commsgeelong)

Kate has been working in marketing and PR for twenty years, initially in educational publishing in the UK, and has been working in the health system for the past ten years. She is Director of Communications & Marketing at Barwon Health, Victoria’s largest regional health service.

 She is a committed communicator, fascinated by new technology and self-confessed social media addict.

So you have been given the green light to expand your team and employ a social media expert, but is a social media expert what you need or do you really need an expert communicator?

Traditionally, marketing health has been limited to print, TV, radio, events and promotional collateral.  On a generalised level, this was about sending blanket messages, saturating the media with key health messages in the hope that they would sink in.  In terms of the electronic medium, it was really only recently, the last 10 to 15 years, that organisations built websites, but again these were relatively static and one-dimensional and were not so much encouraging a dialogue, rather acting like a brochure for products and services.

The future is quite different; we are now, thanks to the emergence of social media, faced with the expectation by the community that we will be willing to talk to individuals and encourage a dialogue. But this has meant the marketing functions of a health organisation have had to change.

This boils down to the people we employ to spread our health messages. They need to be creative which is nothing different to the past, they need to be able to write, again no difference here. But, and it is a big but, they need to be capable of engaging and have a willingness to learn, change and to adapt to an environment that is rapidly evolving.

Finding people with experience and expertise to meet this ‘communication challenge’ has meant taking a different approach. Not only do we need a person who is trained in the essentials of marketing and PR but someone who is a true ‘communicator’, a person who does not shy away from dealing with the consumer.

We need to look for people who can write, but they need to be able to adapt their writing style to suit the social media world, ‘corporate speak’ just does not cut it anymore!

Having recently recruited a team member to take on responsibility for an online portfolio we looked for a person who was ‘online smart’ rather than a self-professed social media expert; they had to understand privacy settings for one thing!  We also looked for someone who would embrace change and see social media as another tool in the toolbox rather than the answer to everything, replacing the existing tools of print, media, TV etc.  We looked for someone who wasn’t driven by a good knowledge of social media tools; rather we looked for someone who had a desire to communicate.

So where is this going?

Well it is about saying we need to embrace social media and listen to our consumers, marketing is no longer about pushing a message out but is about  pulling people in.

- encouraging  consumers to engage. It is about being proactive in managing your brand in the online world, not being afraid to confront negativity in a constructive way and placing transparency front and foremost in your communication strategy. It is also saying that social media is not the answer to everything but simply another tool; you still need the traditional mediums to tell people that you are engaged and waiting online…otherwise you will be a voice in the wilderness.