Within constantly evolving media industries, a brand’s survival depends on its employees having the right skills. The need to properly train staff in everything from fire safety regulations to dealing with an angry customer is front of mind for most, but when you’re talking about social media, it’s so new that almost everyone is learning as they go.

Spoke Digital was launched yesterday, set up as an independent digital training and consultancy agency specialising in social media, community engagement and content. The agency is headed up by Ilana Fox, who left her role as social media manager at ASOS at the end of February 2010: ‘The industry is maturing at an astonishing rate. We’ve found that lots of companies want to recruit people with social media skills to ensure the conversation about their brand is appropriate, transparent, and doesn’t damage their business. However, a lot of people who work for ‘conversation agencies’ don’t have real-time experience of managing situations like these – and this is a potential nightmare for both them and the companies involved.”

Thanks to a maturing sector and the overhwelming influence of self-publishing, education is more important than ever. “People are starting to ask for proof of return on investment, efficiency in processes and best practice models. Digital media is growing up and organisations need guidance,” said Holly Seddon, partner at Spoke.

Shel Holtz and Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt discussed the benefits of guidelines versus policy on both of their blogs at the beginning of the year, with the latter saying that policy was uneccessary as more rules only make a company more bureaucratic.

Shel agreed that rules might be a bad idea for employees, but that guidelines are helpful to employees in giving them a baseline of what to do and what not to do in social media. But as John Cass points out, guidelines can help everyone in the company, even practiced communicators, but they have to be accompanied by an effective training program.