When it comes to social media strategy and implementation there is always the question, well whose responsibility is it? Marketing, communications, PR, the CEO or maybe the office junior?
I won’t attempt to explore this question because I think there can be many answers. What I’m more interested in is PR’s role in social media interaction. We see many sales-hungry businesses look at online channels like Twitter as another space for their ‘hard sell’ messages, posting things like, “Get more bang for your buck! Sign up today!”
Just like we do when explaining how to engage all media forms, print, broadcast, radio and online, our role is to educate. It’s about the right message for the right medium to reach to right people. Not a matter of loading up the marketing gun with sales messages and blindly shooting it hoping that someone will get hit and buy your product.
Our role isn’t necessarily to pose as our clients in these channels but to help them utilise social media in a way that will achieve their end objectives. Social media should be considered in light of an overall communications strategy and should work in conjunction with other activities like media relations and events.
There are big opportunities for businesses within the online world and some of the traditional methods of communicating have changed. It’s not longer about speaking at audiences with a set message but about exchanging information with your audience in a more personal and meaningful manner.
Good communication has never been about the technology, technology is just what we use to communicate.
Jo
Good point about “whose role”? Some recent research indicates that in the US the social media role is being led by PR rather than marketing.
On the role of the PR company, it is surely not the PR company’s role to “pose as the client”. That sort of thing completely undermines the whole process of building trust, which is being recognised increasingly as either the key element of a healthy social media engagement or at least as an essential element.
I am the former head of Digital Marketing for Microsoft and I’d like to provide my two cents because digital marketing, social influence marketing (SIM) and digital PR / online repuation management is what I’ve been doing globally and it’s a passionate subject for me.
I am someone who was tasked with defining, developing strategy, developing capability (including training, infrastructure and operationalisation – playbooks, workflows, policies, guidelines etc) and executing digital marketing and social influence marketing at both the local and global level.
Any great customer centric organisation should have sales, customer service, channels, product development and PR etc as part of their marketing unit. If they don’t, then they are not taking full advantage of the critical changes in consumer behaviour and more importantly fundamental marketing and customer experience best practices.
As I have been evangelising for the past 3-4 years, we have moved from a marketing era of ‘Information asymmetry’ to ‘Information Democracy’. Marketing used to be command and control and it was largely a monologue being broadcast through monologue style channels like TV, print, radio etc. Today, Marketing is a Dialogue and the best marketers (and companies) are those who are the best listeners. More of my insights at http://www.slideshare.com/martinwalsh
As such, social influence marketing should be led by the marketing function with very strong collaboration and engagement with the other functions. In most cases this can (or should) be led by the digital marketing executive/team as social influence marketing (SIM) is interdependent with all aspects of online channels from SEO to SEA, websites (on and off network), online analytics, online reputation management, online channel experience (ecommerce, video, podcasting, community, usability, design, chat, click to call etc), social CRM and more. It then requires very strong collaboration with the other marketing disciplines such as PR, customer service, sales, advertising, direct response, product development etc.
I will give you a small example; Online Reputation Management / Digital PR touches digital related infrastructure and capability such as your social media newsroom, SEO/SEA, analytics, social media monitoring, social CRM and your own websites & external websites to name a few. It is critical that not only is there a strategy in place for how this ties in with the overall marketing plan but importantly you have the right analytics skills, dashboards / reports, workflow between PR, management, online producers & marketers, the right social media monitoring & engagement tools and on and on.
Many cutting edge organisations have even gone further and completely redesigned their marketing function to put social media / social influence marketing at their core of customer / audience engagement and marketing and disciplines like advertising are now seen purely as a contact strategy. Dell & Ducati are great examples.
Here is Dell video on social media marketing – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WK_xVc1pqA
My view is that initially digital marketing (incl social media or SIM) should be centralised to ramp up capability, learning and experience but in parallel this same team would also be charged with training and strongly influencing the traditional marketing, sales, customer service & product development units. Can you imagine an organisation trying to get ahead of the curve with digital marketing and social media / social influence marketing by just doing training programs and brining in outside ‘consultants’? My experience is internal marketers at large global companies get social media more than agencies and external consultants now – some, not all. It would take years to train and change behaviour of traditional marketers and my own experience is that when push comes to shove around time and budget, marketers and agencies fall back to what they know and what they are comfortable with. In addition, there is a very poor understanding and expertise around online measurement and analytics and therefore you need people who have this as part of their DNA every day.
As the skills, experience and discipline becomes more ingrained you can then decentralise some of the centralised capability but this will depend on whether you organisation is truly customer centric vs being product or business unit centric. An added benefit for us was that our centralised team crossed product unit boundaries and was aligned by audience so we got a dual benefit.
In my role I provided a very strong leadership, evangelising and visionary function, helping management, marketers and agencies to first understand the behavioural and environmental issues which changed the marketing fundamentals (and also that it wasn’t a fad). I then helped defined what it meant to Microsoft, developed strategy frameworks to put it into practical context, then developed training programs, brought in centralised talent to expedite capability, operationalized the capability across my teams and the other disciplines, marketers and agencies and then helped to develop campaigns and execute them.
So, the answer to the question is that for any social media / social influence marketing and digital marketing capability to succeed you MUST have support from the senior leadership team (remember the relinquish control axiom) or any effort will likely fail. But importantly you MUST have a person who understands the entire digital AND traditional marketing spectrum / disciplines, be responsible for leading the development of strategy, the development of capability (infrastructure & talent) and the execution of social media / social influence marketing because it is interdependent with all of the other digital marketing capabilities, it is not mutually exclusive. Of course collaboration with PR and the other marketing disciplines is crucial!
Regards,
Martin