[Photo by Pete Prodoehl]

I learned the other day that Homebase don’t refer to their employees as ‘staff members’ or ‘colleagues’. They call them experts.

I love this: it shows that they’ve hired people to be good at their roles – it boldly acknowledges the skills and know-how each person there brings.

Here are five reasons why hiring a social media expert will never be as good as getting the experts you already have in your organisation using social media.

1. Your brand ain’t your logo

Your #Brand is what people think of you. http://t.co/pMTVGckAsy

— Ted Matthews (@WeWantTed) May 18, 2013

Your logo, strapline, corporate plan and marketing can carry any messaging you want – the service or product has to work. This is down to your staff’s competence, enthusiasm and ability to work.

Organisations need brand ambassadors and your staff are the most powerful people to do a good job of this. Why would we just rely on them to fly the flag face-to-face and on emails? Let’s get them using digital forms of communication.

I work with the public sector but this principle applies to any organisation: confidence in the service or product we get from an organisation is going to be much higher if we believe the people running the show are experts in their field.

2. People trust people

• Here’s a company you can’t find anything out about except for the official line that’s on its corporate website.
• Here’s a company that employs: an awesome HR expert who uses Linkedin and is always up to speed on the latest hiring news and practice; an approachable, wise CEO on Twitter who shows visible leadership; a customer service person who is always looking at new ways to be helpful and shares entertaining stories about working there.

Which would you trust most? Which would give you a better feel for the real brand values? I reckon it’s the second one.

3. Experts need experts

When you are the most knowledgeable person in your subject at your organisation sometimes you need to tap into the brains of people who do similar things to you outside of where you work. Social media allows your staff to connect to other specialists, to learn and share and compete and generally up their game. If we’re not encouraging colleagues to make use of these free tools then we’re denying our organisations a cheap chance to get more gain more skills.

4. They’re probably doing it already

It’s very simple, restricting access or permission to network on social media on behalf of your company will not stop people doing it.

But employees – experts – will be using social media to research, learn and share: they just won’t put your organisation’s name to it, or they’ll do it without identifying themselves.

For control freaks: this means you can’t monitor what’s being said out there by your own people.

The bigger point is that if you trust your staff are doing good things (otherwise, why did you hire them?) – then you are missing out on all that warmth and loyalty staff are building for themselves not the brand.

5. PR and social media ‘gurus’

I like to think of myself as being pretty informed and creative when it comes to using social media for my work. So, basically, this post is an argument for why people like me aren’t very important. This post is… possibly putting myself out of work before I’ve even paid off my overdraft!

I work in PR and communications though, there’s a great need for these disciplines. But it can’t be about polishing turds, smartening up text to make press releases and pushing out stories on Facebook and Twitter. That’s old news. PR should be helping our experts to communicate well.

PR people are expert communicators, that doesn’t mean doing everything. It means helping, advising and providing intelligence for the organisation and to staff to help them do their jobs better.

To borrow a phrase from the splendid Dan Slee – we need to share the sweets. Let’s give experts the tools they need to show off their work.

Expert