When writing a blog post one of the elements I need to decide on is the title. Should it be descriptive, a twist of words, controversial, or just plain ignorant. The title of this blog post fits the last description.
See Kim Stephens blog post Social Media are about Engagement, not Control in which she starts out with the incorrect perceptions that people have about how their goal is to control social media. Control is a myth that keeps getting mentioned by people who have no idea of what they are dealing with. You can control some things, such as who in your organization can engage in social media -- while they are at work. You can also scan and delete negative information about your organzation from your website or your organizational social media platforms, then the negativity will only exist everywhere else on the internet and trust and transparency in your organization will be destroyed.
I like to think of social media as a large broad river. You can try to tame it like the Corps of Engineers has tried to tame the Mississippi River with dams, dikes and levees. Doing so will give you a false sense of security because in reality the river of social media is going to go where it wants and you have no control whatsoever over the direction it will take, what will be said and the outcomes. Not engaging social media is never a good solution. Sticking your head in the sand as the river of social media swirls around you is what some are doing today. I believe that they will be picked up by the social media river and carried like flotsam, tumbled scraped along the bottom until they are dumped on distant shore unrecognizable in form or function, wondering, "What just happened?"
