Who Owns Social Media - SF 10/21

Join us on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @ CNet headquarters in San Francisco from 6-830pm for this important debate / conversation.  Professional members of Social Media Club (paid members in good standing) receive free registration, the general public is $5 in advance and $10 at the door if there are seats remaining.

Who owns social media? This is a question that really needs to be understood better. Of course, the first response of many people is that no one can really ‘own’ social media, everyone uses it. But enterprises around the globe are struggling with figuring out where social media fits within their hierarchical, org chart driven world. This is an important question that has significant consequences for how social media evolves.

In this sense, we are really talking about who is responsible for social media in the enterprise? Most social media ‘insiders’ would naturally say, everyone is responsible, but this is just not the reality for most businesses. Someone needs to allocate budget, someone needs decisionmaking authority over infrastructure and major programs, someone needs to rewrite job descriptions upon which employees are measured and many more people need to understand why, where and how to engage.

At the moment there seems to be an inclination that Social Media belongs in the communications wheelhouse, but others argue for support and others argue for Human Resources to be in charge while others think that this is clearly an IT issue. Can all of these people be right? In which situations is it most appropriate? How are organizations evolving to embrace the new conversational modalities of customer interaction? What about its use internally?

With the ever insightful Cathy Brooks from Seesmic joining Chris Heuer as co-moderators, we will explore these questions and many others to develop a deeper understanding of this issue that will hopefully help corporate Social Media Champions around the world. The debaters/panelists for this great event include Seth Goldstein from SocialMedia.com, Mike Manuel from Vocce Communications, Jeremy Toeman from Live Digitally and one other person still TBD.

The evening starts at CNet at 6pm with networking and informal conversation. From 7-8PM we will be digging into the question of Who Owns Social Media? The event will wrap up at 830pm.

Special thanks to our continuing Social Media Club event sponsor, Optaros, a development and strategy firm that designs, assembles and supports next generation Internet applications. If you are interested in sponsoring this or other Social Media Club events, contact us today.

Please do register in advance as we expect this event to be sold out.

In the meantime, lets get this conversation rolling.  Who do you think owns social media? why?

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