not long-winded at all– I love thoughtful comments on my relatively lazy posts. I look forward to your follow-up post.

There are certainly agencies and companies that do a great job of guiding young, social-savvy pros when it comes to goals, strategies, etc. for their social media efforts.

But in the past couple months, I’ve had at least 10-15 young pros tell me that their bosses (agency and corporate) figure they can run the company’s first foray into social media just because they are young and/or are on Facebook. And several of them said they had friends who were experiencing the same thing. Sure, it’s anecdotal, but it still struck me as a problem that should be discussed.

In asking them questions about it, most of them said their bosses didn’t use social media and were uncomfortable with the platforms. That and they were looking at the social media effort as a one-off. “I’m hearing a lot about Facebook. Create a Facebook page for us and run it.” (which is another problem altogether!)

The consensus from these 10 or so was that they were uncomfortable with it. They said stuff like managing a personal page on FB is different than a brand’s. (I agree) Or that they didn’t know what they were supposed to work toward accomplishing – and their bosses didn’t either.

Another interesting take that I hadn’t thought of came from the comments. A young pro said she was put in a digital role right out of school because she had some knowledge of the tools and now that she’s been doing it a couple years, digital campaigns is all she works on. She feels like she’s being pigeon-holed and hasn’t had an opportunity to work on any offline projects that she’d enjoy learning more about managing.

I asked her to write a guest post about that for my blog. I’ll share it with you when it’s up on Monday.

Thanks again! (And sorry for the long-winded comment) :)