Move beyond blogging - start buzzing

Steve Bridger has definitely topped my rather prosaic social reporter role with the proposal that nonprofits need a "buzz director", who takes a creative rather than technical approach to social media. This would give whoever lands the role some influence. As well as encouraging colleagues to blog and use other tools, they should:

• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• If you see the never-ending strategic review dragging your new colleagues down, remind them of the reasons they joined your organisation in the first place. Get them passionate (and close) to your cause once again. Share their passion. Be energetic. Be useful.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation.
  

As well as a host of other ideas about using social media, Steve counsels:

• Don’t get too big for your boots and call all this a ‘project’ because it will run into the rails. Don’t call it a pilot as no one will take it seriously enough.
• Do prepare a monthly report of activity and ensure it is distributed widely within the organisation.
• Not-for-profits unwilling to consider some or all of the above, risk becoming irrelevant. How will your organisation be different in three years time?

Nick Booth, over at Podnosh, definitely sees a major role, not least because organisations need a reflective process to understand properly what makes them special. That has to be interactive.

For me Steve’s description of a ‘buzz director’ reads a little like the qualities you may wish for in a leader.
Any individual devoting so much effort to understanding the cause, relating to actual and potential supporters and talking to the team should also play a pivotal role in refining the point of the organisation, defining what it is that could make you great.

However, I take comfort in the reporter role from Jeff Jarvis - appropriately at BuzzMachine - citing Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger:

He predicted that reporters will become converged newsgathers. All reporters will work in at least five media and networked journalism would see professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, but he left open the question of who would edit it. “I think you have to prepared to be surprised and you have to experiment like mad.”

That's easy then. Everyone will have to be able to do everything ... whatever they are called.