Today’s post is a guest post by Maddie Grant of SocialFish, a consulting firm that helps associations build community on the social web.

Based on our work with associations of all shapes and sizes, we can say with certainty that small staff associations are (or have the potential to be) ahead of the curve when it comes to becoming social organizations.

Don’t believe me? Social media and the digital age are changing the way we work — in terms of individual behavior (how you present yourself online and manage the personal vs professional dichotomy), in terms of internal process (how you share conversations and monitoring and the management of social media communications internally) and in terms of organizational culture (how you become more transparent, more open, how you  incorporate flattening hierarchies).

In each of these three areas, small staff associations have a HUGE advantage over larger organizations.

Individual behavior
The challenges of social media for individual behavior have to do with, in part, how you manage resources, how you mix work and personal activity, how you communicate and build relationships with members. Small staffs of course have these challenges too, but they struggle with time management anyway (because they are small staff!) and conversation about improving how workload might be shared and allocated is built into the system.

It’s easier to see what other activities might be reduced in order to accommodate social media activity when you’re not as siloed into large departments with rigid responsibility structures.  In terms of the personal/professional question, small staffs tend to be closer to members (e.g.members already know who to talk to for particular things) and, in my experience, get to know them on a personal level too — so it’s potentially not such a big deal to interact online in social spaces.

Internal process
Some internal process challenges with managing social media work have to do with different departments having different priorities and different deadlines;  “knowledge archipelagos” where someone somewhere has the info we need but we’re not sure who; and decision-making “black holes” where suddenly a lot more people want to have a say in particular decisions.

With small staff associations, generally speaking, everyone knows what everyone else is working on, everyone knows who has expertise on a particular subject, and there’s likely to be a fairly simple reporting structure.

Organizational Culture
Social media challenges in terms of organizational culture often have to do with becoming more transparent, and shifting leadership capacity away from the top hierarchy of an organization  towards more middle-level leadership and outside (volunteer) leadership. Small staffs simply have a greater ability to share important information (say from the Board) internally — if there are only 6 people on your staff, I bet at least three of those people know everything about everything.

What large organization can say that 50 percent of their staff have a complete strategic picture of the organization? And small staffs already shift leadership over to volunteer leaders, because there’s more work than there are bodies in the office!

Case in point for all of these areas: ever stop to think why so many national organizations are scrambling to keep up with their chapters and components with social media activity? It’s because those chapters are nimbler, more collaborative internally, and closer to their members on the ground. Think about it.

So go ahead, pat yourselves on the back, and know that you are doing a great job no matter how small or large your forays into social media are. Know that you can be VERY thankful you don’t work for a large-staff organization … Trust me when I tell you those organizations are finding community-building online to be much more challenging than you are.