Integrating Social Media- A Middle Up Down Approach

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In talking with Jess Krywosa yesterday, I realized that I hadn’t explained much about my take on how I get traction on social media projects in companies. The way we do it at New Marketing Labs more often than not is with what I call the middle-down, middle-up approach. Okay, that might take a few sentences to explain for some of you.

Essentially, it’s this: someone in the middle tier of the organization comes to us and asks about a project, maybe something like content marketing or community management. We talk with them, discuss their goals, make sure there’s some kind of alignment, determine if we both see eye to eye on the loot it’ll take to get the job done, and then we initiate a project. Here’s what we see happen more often than not.

The middle-level person has a faint blessing from someone on high, but a vague one. They have enough power to convince the folks lower in the hierarchy to go along with this. We work to make that middle-level person successful, and to make the experience for the folks a bit further down the hierarchy feel like it’s a good project and that they’re participating.

Then what happens is that someone higher up almost always gets excited about what the person has accomplished, and gets into it, wants to champion it, and throws some more fuel on the fire.

The middle-down, middle-up approach. That seems to be how we’re getting it done.

You? Does this make sense for your organization? Have you seen similar (or different) experiences to getting new things implemented where you are?