The challenge of managing (or corralling) multiple voices into a consistent organizational voice or brand has always been a challenge for arts organizations, especially when those voices in the organization are expressive individuals. With the growth of on-line media, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, the challenge has grown more public and more global.

Further, the challenge isn't just to decide what your organization should do, but discover what its many constituents are already doing. These systems tend to bridge the professional/personal divide without a blink -- meaning that many of your staff will already have personal accounts to share their family photos and personal updates. On those accounts, they may also be sharing work-related thoughts, as well.

So, an emerging job for cultural managers is to embrace the many ways their organizations engage the world -- personally and professionally, as individuals and as collectives -- and somehow align those voices in some coherent way.

Beth Kanter offers some specific advice for one particular platform -- how nonprofits can/should manage multiple Twitter accounts. The questions are many, but also increasingly important to ask out loud:

You'll need to decide who is doing the Tweeting for your organization.  Will you set up one flagship account and have one or more staff members tweet from that account?  Or will you have an organizational account but also encourage staff to Tweet as well?

In the early days of the web, arts organization web sites were often constructed by whoever on staff or among the volunteers had the skills to attempt it -- often a lower-level staff member in tech support or administration. Eventually, the leadership realized the on-line voices of the web sites were too important to leave out of the strategic fold.

That same day is coming for the broader range of social media, if it hasn't come already. Time to do a social media inventory, and construct some strategy to realign your on-line voice.