If you want to read a GREAT blog post on what I’m about to write on, head over to Jason Baer’s blog and read Delegation Equals Death in Social Media.

In fact, I’m going to snag a quote directly from the post. It relates to the all too common occurance of senior level management in marketing agencies basically saying:

“Us old dogs don’t really understand all this new social media stuff, but we’ve got this brilliant young guy right out of school, and he’s getting us all up to speed.”

Jason’s conclusion on this:  Bang bang.  You’re dead.

He’ll be right on that, say, 98% of the time.

Like Jason, I’ve continually run into senior level ad and PR types who have take either no or very little time to grasp any semblance of social media digital marketing.  They playfully call themselves something related to being “old” and then seemingly pass off the learning to someone who is “young”.  And sure enough, that “young” person is usually so low on the totem pole of authority within a firm that they really aren’t taken seriously.  Perhaps the “old” ones will turn to the “young” one and ask questions, but it usually is done with the mindset that the “young” one is just a kid and all of this stuff is new and it will be, some day, pretty big.

The problem is that it’s already big TODAY.  Period.

To me, the above situation has two elements.  One, it’s the senior people calling themselves “old” and chuckling about it, as if to somehow say that it’s alright that they’ve been sitting out this evolutionary change in the marketing communications fields.  The second part  is that they seem to be putting it off on that youngster to add some flavor to the mix of offerings.  That youngster will never be able to have enough credence with the senior folks and will ultimately be overruled and not really listened to.  The result is that the firm will really not be offering social media services.

Now I can understand how this develops the senior people were trained a particular way and have been at it for years.  Digital marketing is a whole new world and social media may be foreign to them.  That’s fine.  But it’s the lack of taking it seriously that gets me.  In many cases, I hear that a company’s clients are asking for “this stuff”.  Perhaps more importantly are the POTENTIAL clients out there whose business an agency doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting because they - or the leaders of the company - can’t even talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.

If I headed up an agency, I’d make it a requirement that my staff, at the very least, got up and running with profile on Facebook and had an account on Twitter.  I’d make sure they knew how to really use them…how to interact and become a presence.

Is this an absolute necessity in the immediate sense?  Probably not, at least not 100% of the time.  But it’s big enough to justify that saying “you want to stay one step ahead of the competition”.

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