Nature vs. Nuture, or Why You Should Follow Your Gut on the Social Web

Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 10:12am.
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Photo: johncabrerea@att.netPhoto: johncabrerea@att.net

I've been crafting the "official" NTEN Social Media Strategy. (What makes it official? It has its own Google Doc.) The majority of the time I spent thinking, I can't believe it's taken me this long to watch our own webinars and listen to our own advice! I scoured the internet for resources. Turns out, there were plenty in our own backyard. 

I read and read and quickly became overwhelmed. I took a break from reading. I watched. I listened. I shut off my computer all weekend and didn't even look at Facebook. I sat down and wrote our plan. 

What really shocked me is that when The Strategy was (relatively) complete, it turned out not to be much different from what we've been doing all along.  

Before I go any further, I should confess that I'm a part of the Millennial generation. On the cusp of generation X, I nonetheless took computer classes in primary school and had my very first AOL screen name at the tender age of 12. (I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours.) Supposedly, social media comes more naturally to me.  

But here's the secret: it's actually natural to all of us. 

We human beings are social beings. On a daily basis we listen, we connect, we share, and we evaluate -- all steps in a solid social media plan.  

Think about your in-person interactions. You listen to a conversation, you connect with those involved, you share your relevant information, and then, when you walk away, you evaluate that interaction. Granted, this is probably not as formal a process as it is at the office -- but you walk away from every conversation knowing whether you accomplished what you set out to do, consciously or not.

How do you know? Well, it's a feeling. If you're laughing or smiling, you were successful. Grumpy or frowning? Not so successful.  

The same goes for social media. We know when something doesn't work and we know when it just feels right. Much like you need to take risks to learn and grow in your physical reality, you have to do the same in your virtual reality.

This also applies to organizations. As Community Manager at NTEN, my job is to take the conversations already happening in our office, at the NTC, and in the 501 Tech Clubs, and move those onto the social web so that they can happen more consistently and reach more people.  

The idea isn't to start something totally new, but rather to continue doing what we do daily -- and keep track of it, so we can do it better as we go along.

To be clear, I'm NOT advocating that you skip the social media plan at your organization. Even though it turns out that NTEN's strategy isn't much different from our instincts, it's still important for us to have clear objectives and tactics for reaching our objectives. 

It's necessary to have a place to document and track the evaluation of our experiments. That way, we can avoid making mistake more than once and grow from our successes and failures. We can see what works: what attracts more people to our conversation? We can also see what turns us into the anti-social kid in the corner and avoid doing that again.  

It benefits the organization to have it written down in one place, where everyone on staff can see our plan, as opposed to storing it in the collective NTEN brain. We need to be able to reference our past successes and failures and recognize the benefits having community conversations on the social web brings to NTEN and our members.

What I AM advocating for is for you to step away from your fears. 

Don't let yourself get overwhelmed by the thousands of social media reports, tools, analyses, blog posts, and recommendations out there. Trust your instincts. Most likely, you and your organization have been participating in the discussion all along -- only now there are computers involved, your friends are counted and tracked, and instead of sending you a thank you card, they "like" your blog post.

Here are a few resources I found helpful along the way: