This evening i attended the Social Media Club San Francisco meeting on the subject of "Who Owns Social Media?". Andrew Mager over at ZDNet was live blogging from the room and also has posted some photos (darn somehow i missed the skittles!).

It was a lively conversation in the room but unfortunately the panel discussion was a bit too short- but i already hear rumblings on the internets that this conversation is continuing.

The main question that the panel tried to address was 'who is responsible for social media in the enterprise?'. As Chris Heuer posted on his introduction post to the event "Most social media ‘insiders’ would naturally say, everyone is responsible, but this is just not the reality for most businesses. Someone needs to allocate budget, someone needs decision making authority over infrastructure and major programs, someone needs to rewrite job descriptions upon which employees are measured and many more people need to understand why, where and how to engage."

I have been involved in the Social Media conversation for a while and it feels good to have these conversations- the practice of using social medial across the enterprise (internally and externally) is maturing and these issues are coming to a head with many companies and the good folks that belong to the Social Media Club around the world are the right people to be guiding these conversations.

One of the questions that i wanted to ask but did not get a chance to address with the panel but did chat with @MeHeatherD and @jacobm afterwards- is who owns the 'brand' of the Social Media leaders in your company. When they leave- how much of the Social Media they have created do they get to take and own (defining 'own' as Intellectual Property (IP)) and even if they don't take the 'content' what is the brand value that they can essentially never truly transfer and that there is no way you can write into their job description or company rules? Or can you?

Image|Seattle City Light Brochures, Seattle Municipal Archives. |via Flickr