Keeping Social Media in Check

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know when I say that new media has changed our entire industry. Generally, when you think about this, though, you think about outbound message deployment. Which social media avenues do we use, if any? What do we say? How can we grow followers, friends, mayors, etc.?
But, another challenge to our industry is on the traffic front. Internally, our processes evolve just as fast. The steps for a television production job or direct mail media job are pretty well defined – they’ve been set by years of experience with these types of projects.
Social media…not so much. We do have years of experience with new media under our belt, yes. But, because that media changes on a minute-by-minute basis, it’s very difficult to give specific tasks to our team, not to mention keep up with the completion of these tasks since they happen so fast.
For instance, putting a full quarter’s editorial calendar into a task list is both time-consuming and confusing. Obviously, we use CurrentTrack as our main operations tool, but we’ve also laid Google calendar on top of that, as well as a few other proprietary tools that allow us to set a lot of this work in motion even when we’re asleep.
It’s both challenging and exciting for me – every time I think we’ve got it down to a science, we have to innovate with our internal systems just as much as we do with our recommendations for our clients.