Understanding Leadership and Management Roles in Social Media

I’ve been thinking and writing for a while now about the underlying concepts of Social Media – stuff that I keep on insisting to people are the ‘bigger concepts’ regardless of tools, much of which enters the realm of cultural and economic commentary.

The distinction I keep coming back to is between management and leadership.

Leadership and Management in Social Media

As Benjamin Ellis put it: “You manage things, but lead people.” Traditional business management looks at processes and systems. Today’s environment has commoditised those processes – differentiation now rests in having great people and building an environment that lets them operate at their highest level.

Social Media is a fruit of a knowledge economy. It requires very able leadership. All of the things that a Social Media practitioner should be strong at are intangible and locked into people:

• Knowing how people think, how communities work, and how to gain knowledge from them
• The ability to identify and adapt quickly to new information, new trends, new threats and opportunities
• Being able to build processes that are flexible and learn
• Having keen insight into a brand and communicating it through Social Media
• Having strong intuition about where the market is going

It's a game of two halves

We must have both leadership and management. A lack of leadership creates Social Media ghost towns – Facebook pages with no activity or purpose, campaigns that overestimate target audience participation.

A lack of management creates Social Media train wrecks. Eurostar, anybody?

Successful Social Media must be led and developed first, by a leader. Then managed, by someone who can take innovation and turn it into repeatable processes.