Some of the email communication I’ve received about my ‘Project Management in 72 hours’ post (and here) has focused on the (erroneous) requirement of corporate communicators to know every tool, and know them inside out.
Far from it!
The fantastic thing about the community that has sprung up around the Nobodies meme is that no one person is a proclaimed (or otherwise) expert on everything, but that different people are great at different things. Prior to the Nobodies, I already had my own squidoo lens and thus had some idea on how to set one up, but two of the Nobodies were no doubt vastly more adept at manipulating it than I — Henriette Weber Anderson and Linda Zimmer.
Similarly, in a soon-to-be-launched pan-global initiative, Sallie Goetsch, Donna Papacosta and I are launching a podcasting consultancy service to corporates. Now, each of us has different skills and abilities — research, writing, presentation, multimedia mixing, voice production, inter alia — so between us we believe we can create something of use to corporate communicators. Obviously I’m not going to start pitching for work in Canada, and I’m sure Sallie won’t be attempting to pick up clients in Australia (of course, we would welcome the opportunity to fly anywhere in the world for you! We are, after all, reassuringly expensive 
).
The whole point of mentioning this, and why it links into my previous ‘Project Management in 72 hours’ post, is that you don’t need to know everything about Web2.0 yourself — you just need to know the people who are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). I know that if one of my clients has an urgent need for assistance in, say, Canada, then a quick phone call or email to Donna P and I have ‘people on the ground’ ready to go. Same with just about any western country — a cry for help is met with assistance in our little marcoms/pr community.
I don’t need to know everything about every location any of my clients deal in — I just need to tap into the SMEs already in place.
The same goes with your own company’s crisis management plan. You don’t need to know everything — you just need to know the people who do.
