There is a large international organization I follow on Facebook and Twitter, and I’m sorry to say that its been making major missteps via these social media tools.

In the last four weeks, whomever is in charge of social media at this organization has posted a message that, in my opinion, was completely inappropriate and put the organization in a very bad light, as well as repeatedly posting inaccurate information relating to the mission of this organization and not responding to most online questions and criticisms. But no one seems to be noticing at the organization – the mistakes keep happening, and when I made inquiries to two people who work for the organization, they had no idea what was going on online (in fact, they weren’t sure who was in charge of social media activities). 

It’s painfully obvious that there is no strategy regarding this organization’s use of social media. Perhaps the job has been handed over to an intern or two – after all, if you are in your 20s, you are just automatically an online social media expert, right? It’s also obvious that no one in senior management is following the accounts regularly – because if they were, these very public missteps wouldn’t have gone on this long.

It brings to mind a long, long time ago, way back in the 1990, when a lot of marketing directors at nonprofit organizations handed over web site development and management to the person in charge of IT – the person who kept the computers running. These marketing managers saw the Web as technology, rather than as outreach. Web sites for these organizations often were packed with flashy web features, but light on information, and answers to basic questions that someone goes to a web site for – where the organization is located, the nearest free parking, the nearest mass transit stop, hours of operation, upcoming event information, how to volunteer, etc. – were oh-so-hard to find. Many marketing directors were oblivious to the web site’s shortcomings – they never looked at the site beyond a unveiling of such (at which pizza and soda was served in the break room and a good time had by all).

Back in 90s, I worked at an organization where I was the internal communications manager – but ended up in charge of all Internet outreach. The marketing director (to whom I did not report) thought the Internet was a fad and said he wasn’t interested in it, so I was in charge of building the organization’s web site, and in undertaking all online outreach via email and online discussion groups. He never had any idea what I was doing, and was never interested in sitting down and learning. After several months, he realized his mistake, as what was happening online was being talked about by people and organizations we were trying tor reach much more than our print materials.

I said it back in the 1990s, I’ll say it again now: everyone has a role in an organization’s outreach, online and offline. The receptionist needs to see the organization’s main brochure before it goes to print, or the web site before it’s launched – she or he knows the primary reasons why people call the organization, and she or he can make sure these publications include this information. The people that deliver the organization’s programs or interact most with the public, as well as senior managers, including the head of marketing, need to follow the organization’s social media profiles, and their feedback about such needs to be listened to. Everyone at the organization needs to have copies of print publications and, if they have a comment about the usability of an online tool or how the public is responding to the organization online, senior management needs to listen to them.

Just as importantly, your organization needs a fully integrated social media strategy, a plan that puts a reason behind every Facebook status update and every Tweet, one that answers the questions What are we going to accomplish today with our social media use? What are we going to accomplish this week with our social media use? Three months from now, how are we going to measure social media success? Does the head of marketing have a written outreach plan, and are online tools fully-integrated into such – not just mentioned? Does the head of programming have a fully-integrated plan for using online tools, including social media, in his or her written strategy for the coming year?

And, finally, make sure whomever is posting those messages to Facebook or Twitter or GooglePlus or whatever on your organization’s behalf is fully supervised. That person needs to be sitting in on every marketing meeting and every public event. That person needs to be presenting a briefing on what’s happened in the last week – and not just number of tweets, number of Facebook status updates, number of “likes”, number of “friends”, etc., because numbers really mean nothing. And senior management needs to be following what this person is doing online in real time.

Delegating social media tasks doesn’t mean senior management stops participating online. Too many nonprofit organizations, international aid agencies and other mission-based organizations forget that.