Janitor 2.0 The Unsexy Side of Social Media

So despite all the hype I and others wrap around social media programs, there remains a very raw, very real and very unsexy part of this line of work that seldomly gets discussed — and that's the ugly, but critical custodial maintenance of the social web.

This is what I jokingly, err, awkwardly refer to as "Janitor 2.0"

Like it or not, the creation and adoption of social tools for business, be they blogs, forums, wikis, or otherwise, each comes with their own unique maintenance needs — and yeah, those needs must be tended to; often by a quiet, nameless pool of marketing, PR and web folk who work pretty damn hard to ensure everything else works as it should.

Broken links. Comment spam. Trackback spam. Invite scrubs. Inconsistent tags. Email filtering. Page overloads. Server balancing. Browser incompatibilities. And the list goes on, you get the gist.

It's all the unspoken, unexpected and undervalued stuff that must happen every day to keep a healthy "conversation" going.

For this reason, it's a huge defining factor between the success or failure of a social media program. Fittingly, it's also an important defining factor between those "new media experts" that know what they're talking about and, well, those that use the word "easy" a lot.

My advice?

Using social media is a powerfully messy business. Anticipate and over plan for the maintenance, upkeep and clean up of every social tool you use, and generally speaking, accept the fact that you have yet another hat to wear, a blue one this time, in this messy middle. Good luck.

Comments

[Shane]

You're quite right. Web 2.0 and social networking have become the newest buzzwords of the Internet marketing community. I have recently started playing with it and having a lot of fun. They do have some downfalls: they are very time consuming building the networks and there is a lot of maintenance involved with maintaining those social networks. However, I do believe with the right strategies that social networking can be a powerful tool in your marketing kit.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Shane

[Dan Greenfield]

All I can say is thank my lucky stars that IT folks exist. Social media's technical underbelly is often overlooked until something goes wrong and you get a call from client or executive. It sure is very messy in the middle.

[Mike Manuel]

@Dan - Indeed....

[BadgerGravling]

Totally agree, and it's something which is overlooked so much that it's ridiculous.

So many developments focus on the user experience (Which is correct), but then neglect to look at the Janitor roles, and the effect of overworked Janitors struggling with clunkier systems than the users in some cases.

It's one reason why I'm taking my time to implement new systems at work, and making sure that they are as quick and easy to use from an admin perspective, as well as a user perspective.