No Time For Social Media? Why You Should Make Some

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came across this article, How to Make Space for Social Media,  published on Harvard Business Review by Alexandra Samuel, Vice-President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a market research technology provider (@awsamuel). She had me from the first sentence:

Few professionals were sitting at their desks in 2004, eyeing the empty slots in their calendars and wishing that somebody would just invent a new way of communicating to fill those long and lonely minutes.

Nice. And, something I wanted to share in a way more robust than a simple tweet or LinkedIn update, which is why I’ve based this entry on her’s.

In the article she takes an honest look not at not just the reasons why it makes sense for today’s executives to be active on social media, but why it’s worth giving up other activities in order to find the time to participate. It’s powerful stuff. She supported one of my recurring mantras regarding social business for companies — hire a social media professional to lead the way — but goes on to address the individual executive’s reason for doing so.

Here are the four questions she says execs need to ask themselves in order to realize the value spending (more) time on social networks:

1. What am I learning from social media?
2. Who am I meeting through social media?
3. Who am I reaching through social media?
4. How am I replenished by social media?

Please read the article for the reasoning behind the questions. There’s a lot to learn — and to teach others resistant to the idea of devoting time and energy to social media — that you will be able to use.

After all, the best way to get senior management “buy-in” for your social media initiatives is to first explain the “why” before the “what, how and when”.