Had a really interesting comment on this post about community managers. Lauren Murray said,

As a Director of Council Relations (I manage our membership’s various stakeholder groups), I would love to be considered a community manager, except that we are not using social media strategies to facilitate these communities. Attempts at using a blog with one of the Councils has been quite challenging and our organization just doesn’t seem ready to jump onto the social media platforms other organizations are using (much to my disappointment…though perhaps my arguments aren’t compelling enough). I would love to occupy this space more fully and am wondering how others have overcome leadership challenges in their organizations….or have been able to quietly make inroads into this space). I attended Clay Shirky’s session at the ASAE conference (and am now reading his book), and it’s more than the “information” or “understanding” barrier with leadership….it’s more about an unwillingness to listen (which he really didn’t address). If Maddie or others have suggestions, they’d be welcome.

Maggie McGary replied,

Lauren–my advice is to do some information gathering and listening and go from there. I wouldn’t be discouraged by the blog–blogs can be really challenging, what with needing constant fresh content, attracting readers, etc. I would suggest doing kind of a lay of the land thing–do some searches in Facebook, Ning, Linkedin and Twitter. Are there any self-formed groups of your members out there already? People tweeting about your stakeholders’ issues? Do any of your members blog? The good news is that you can barely pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing about Facebook and Twitter these days–social media use is becoming so mainstream that even holdouts can’t help but hear about it and, one would hope, become more comfortable with it.

That is essentially my advice too! I absolutely agree that finding it difficult to get a blog going is not unusual, and Lindy and I can help with that specifically if Lauren gives us some more details on that. Another tool that is very difficult to get off the ground is a wiki, so if anyone is finding that to be like pulling teeth, you’re not alone. But, like Maggie says, the best thing you can do is drown them in evidence. Start the listening process and show the powers that be examples of people talking about your organization in various social spaces – or even better, show them examples of competing or similar organizations who have a presence in those spaces. (Although of course this is not about keeping up with the Joneses – you need to have good strategic reasons for communicating using social media. But you already knew that!). But nothing will change dissenting minds faster that some cold hard relevant data.

I also dug up this post I wrote a while back about a great paper on guerrilla social media warfare – there are some really useful tips in there!

But I’d love to hear if anyone else has a good take on this. I imagine many people are having the same experience and/or had to overcome some resistance at some point. Have you “been there”? Can you help Lauren?