{"id":1050,"date":"2020-09-16T09:43:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T14:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/servantmarketer.co\/?p=1050"},"modified":"2020-09-16T09:46:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T14:46:23","slug":"episode-5-tony-dobies-social-media-manager-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/servantmarketer.co\/?p=1050","title":{"rendered":"Episode 5 – Tony Dobies | Social Media Manager Mental Health"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.5.4″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.5.4″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.5.4″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.5.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″]

Although I never held the title \u201cSocial Media Manager,\u201d community management and content creation became part of my job fairly early in my career. I wasn\u2019t particularly good at it. In fact, I grew to feel overwhelmed by the constant community management, the snark, the nasty comments filling the DM inbox, but the thing that always bothered me the most was the utter lack of understanding from those above me about what it takes to be a social media manager. People thought it was the \u201cfun\u201d job because they imagined I just spent all day on Facebook. What was a leisure activity for them was a full time job for me. It wasn\u2019t until I went on maternity leave with my third baby, and four people had to pitch in to handle the workload that my colleagues began to understand. In many organizations social media is not only misunderstood, it is understaffed with people who are underpaid, underappreciated and under resourced. Often, this is a paradox as the expectations of leadership about what social media can and should do for the organization doesn\u2019t align with staffing or resources.<\/p>\n

Tony Dobies is a marketing leader at West Virginia University, and he is uniquely positioned to understand the struggles of social media managers as he was one before moving into leadership. The team Tony leads at WVU has, like so many of us, had a very tough year, but their struggles began before the insanity of the early-March Pandemic. But Tony didn\u2019t turn a blind-eye to that suffering. Instead, he did something about it by creating and executing a study on social media manager\u2019s mental health<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And his findings aren\u2019t pretty,<\/p>\n

\u201cNearly half of social media managers in higher education say they do not have adequate support and\/or resources to ensure good mental health.<\/p>\n

In fact, social media managers struggle with their mental health during an average day and much more so in a crisis situation, according to a study by West Virginia University. Using a 0-10 scale where 0 represents poor mental health and 10 represents excellent mental health, social media managers, on average, rate their mental health a 6.35 in a given day. The average decreases to 4.52 when dealing with a crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this episode, Tony and I talk about the study findings as well as:<\/p>\n