I recently had a pleasant surprise at work. One of the VP’s called me into her office and asked me for a favour: would I be willing to help her improve her presence online?

Sadly, this kind of attitude isn’t generally adopted by most executives. The result is that we’re now seeing a kind of generational gap between who owns social media in an organization. With the explosion of the medium in the past five years, people on the organizational level is bound to feel left out. For many of these people, as they’ve advanced to managerial roles focused on project management and coordinating groups of workers, social media has been something they’ve only passively consumed. Add to this the fact that this same group has been tied up starting families and the juggling that career and young kids involves, and you’re looking at a perfect combination to simply have been less active on social media than the Gen Y workers who are now flooding the corporate world.

For a while, it’s been okay to be less than an expert in social media. It’s time to get on board. Regardless of your age, your survival in the workplace depends on your intimate knowledge of social media.

The reasons for this are myriads. Social media has profoundly changed a company’s public face. And with game-changing implications for sales, human resources, public relations, marketing and customer service, virtually nobody is left out of the matrix that touches social media.

With such an important and fast-changing role in the corporate world, social media needs the expertise of workers at all levels; interns and young people know what’s new and often what’s next, while mid and upper-level workers understand social media’s strategic implications for a more macro view of how it affects business.

Now, not everyone in a company needs to provide input for every tweet. But an in-depth and strategic understanding of social media is a must for every level these days. In the midst of an ongoing global recession and public sector austerity measures around the world, job security is largely a thing of the past. Since nobody is safe from the realities and fluctuations of the global economy, even an older Boomer generation needs to embrace social media. In short, we’ve come to the point that social media shouldn’t be a gap in anyone’s knowledge.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points out how families and other social groups start to compartmentalize different forms of knowledge. His example is that because young people in a family know how to work, say, the home stereo, the parents can remain oblivious of this knowledge. Since it’s always been done for them, parents don’t have to worry about making the sound system work. Social groups compartmentalize different knowledge, allowing the overall group to have a larger and deeper knowledge because people can become experts in different things; we don’t all have to know the same things because someone else in the group can pick up our slack and help out using their knowledge.

In many cases, social media has become exactly like this in the corporate environment. Younger groups know how to use it, allowing older groups to remain on the social media sidelines.  

However, as social media continues to redefine business in every way, this gap in knowledge can be dangerous. Older workers who disregard social media are letting a different, competitive generation own a skill set and knowledge that is only going to grow in importance.

So for an older generation, it’s time to start looking at what the kids are doing, and perhaps asking them for a few tips.

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Kiel Hume writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @kielculture.

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