Is your social media team too social?

There is an ongoing debate among social media know-it-alls and legacy marketing experts regarding how best to put together a team that will evaluate, research, implement and in other ways decide whether and/or how to include social media marketing in a company's messaging.  That's a question for another day; here I'm going to comment on how to create a social media team.  This specific topic is very much related to the wider question raised in the first sentence as it can be reflective of how top management sees social media - as an integrated component of communication or as some newfangled widget (no pun intended) to try out.

I recently came across a November 2009 article in Wired-UK (probably also published in the US) which addressed the value of "failure."  In the article an example was used wherein two Bell Labs astronomers attempting to survey radiation in the galaxy were confounded by a static noise which they ultimately concluded meant their equipment had failed.  A year or so later (1965), in a casual conversation with a scientist  in the field of nuclear physics, Robert Dicke at Princeton, one of the astronomers described their failure.  For years, Dicke had been searching for evidence of the then new big bang theory.  Turns out, Dicke claimed, the static was radiation left over from the beginning of the universe, confirming his hypothesis.

Penzias and Wilson, the astronomers, were living in their own silo, consumed by their static problem. Their failure, after an offhand discussion with an outsider, led to a Nobel Prize. 

The main portion of the article describing the work of researcher Kevin Dunbar is perhaps a bit more directly on target.  He had an opportunity to observe two lab meetings working on the same experimental problem (nothing of which I understood!).  One team had only experts on the subject matter - it took this team several weeks to solve the problem.  The other team had people from very different backgrounds, none of whom were subject matter experts - they solved the problem in what appears to have been just an hour or so.

The point here is to avoid putting together a group that will be 'blinkered' by their own beliefs.  Your social media team should be neither all social media experts nor all marketing/communications staff, nor all business line, nor any other single discipline.  A diverse group with some social media knowledge/expertise, institutional knowledge and a passion for their role will likely be the most effective.