I’ve just had a conversation about social media and it’s growth. We were specifically wondering about how companies can step into the space with confidence, now all the hype has died down - and colleagues have expectations and indeed expertise in these social communication channels.

Here’s my two bob’s worth…

For me social media offers the opportunity to engage in conversations with all sorts of people. I listen in, I ask questions, I offer opinions and I engage with friends, colleagues and clients all over the world.

Social media is a broad amplification of word of mouth communication. (I read that somewhere and I agree with it). As with all communication there’s some good and some damagingly bad and most of it in the middle is, well - ok really.

Back in the day we used wet straw and big old leaves to create smoke signals which our neighbours would need to interpret - I imagine often with hilarious results! These days we have more sophisticated ways to communicate and we are increasingly skilled at managing our communications and understanding the meanings. People are endlessly resourceful just look at the fast development of symbols to subvert the 140 character limitations of twitter for example. #tagging, bit.ly shortening of urls etc. and emoticons before that.

We create new words, gestures and symbols and new meanings spring from old symbols used differently - we are endlessly able to invent, create and share these.

Communication professionals need to keep up with the new channels, understand how their audiences are engaging with their brands, products and each other online and learn the new symbols and meanings ascribed to the conversations happening online.

One last thing - we do still tend to think about twitter when we talk about social media but there are hundreds and hundreds of social media applications out there including blogs, wikis, noticeboards, file sharing, bookmarking, niche microblogs and aggregating newsfeeds and on and on and on… many of which offer real benefit to our engagement strategies and our internal communication channels.

We need to take the opportunity to assess our communication and engagement strategies and policies, understand how our people want to engage with us and each other and provide the channels, training and governance to support them to do that in persuit of our business objectives.