Last week, Michelle Prak asked on her blog where social media sits in an organisation. As social media becomes a mainstream activity, the question must be who within an organisation is ultimately responsible for it?
“Social media and PR work well together”
Michelle argues that since social media is about conversations, PR professionals are best suited to take advantage of it. Marketers, she says, are not as interested in what audiences are saying about their brands.
The problem I have with this, is the general misunderstanding about what exactly marketing is. I am a marketer, and in my mind, the essence of marketing is matching consumers with the right products and services that fulfils a need or want in their life. This encompasses everything from supply chain management and customer service to sales and communication.
By my definition, PR, advertising, digital, etc. are all fall under the umbrella discipline of marketing. This is not to say that I’m a PR expert, which I’m not. I’m a marketer with specialised expertise in marketing communications and digital media. Conversely, all PR people are also marketers and to extend that a little bit further, so too is everyone else in an organisation. Understanding what marketing is and what the implications are for business can only make you better at what you do. For instance, customer service are right at the coal face and have more interaction with customers than anyone else. They have as much responsibility for marketing an organisation and embodying what it stands for as someone with ‘marketing’ or ‘communications’ in their job title. By being aware of why it is important to stay on-brand and what that means, they are more able to do their job than someone with no clue about why they have to say or do the things their job demands.
Where was I? Oh, right.
To try and limit social media to just the realm of PR, advertising or any other niche discipline, is to restrict the potential social media has to fundamentally transform a business. Social media must have a multi-disciplinary, marketing-led approach that first and foremost takes into account business objectives before tactics and execution. Only by taking a step back to ask ‘why?’ will an organisation truly know how best it applies to their business.
“Social media fits within a business’s communications strategy”
The first instinct most marcomms people have when presented with something like social media is, how can I use this to broadcast my message? This is exactly the wrong approach to be taking. While the disintermediation of media has enormous advantages, it has almost meant that brands now think they can start broadcasting their message directly to their target market instead of going through a media channel. Just because a conversation is happening out there about your brand doesn’t give you the right to engage with them uninvited.
Thinking about social media purely as a communications tool ignores what I see as two of it’s biggest benefits. Instead of rushing into engage, organisations need to first listen and learn what their customer’s are saying and how they want to be engaged. Going beyond Google alerts and other searches, social media monitoring tools such as Radian 6 and Dialogix gives brands unprecedented ability to monitor and analyse what’s being said about them online.
This insight and access into the mind’s of their consumers allows brands to really build intimate relationships with their customers by tailoring and personalising their approach. Building massive followings and blindly bombarding them with offers and promotions is no different to the traditional advertising that audiences are already switching off to.
As the always insightful Jay Baer writes, a better use for social media might be to strengthen the relationships you already have, rather than create new ones with people you don’t know.
“Why would a consumer “friend” us or “fan” us or “follow” us in social media, unless they were either already a customer, or at the very least had us in their purchase consideration funnel? The average Facebook member becomes a fan of just two companies per month, yet is exposed to thousands of brands during that same period. People don’t experimentally engage with brands in social media, they engage with the brands they already support.”
While the industry is still incredibly nascent, it appears that the best use of social media is when it is approached holistically and not just focused on the conversation but also on the insights into what an organisation’s customers think and say.
Read Michelle’s original post.
Very insightful post and spot on about how a company must first listen and get the feel for the community before engaging. Thank you for the shout out.
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL
i agree with you, i mean, to say that marketers do not listen to their customers is total rubbish – market research is the foundation of any good marketing plan and market research requires that we interact with and survey our prospects and customers. personally i think that social media belongs to everyone because it’s just so damn annoying to deal with a company where the sales people don’t talk to the pr people who don’t talk to the customer service people, distinguishing between marketing, pr and advertising is great for intellectual conversation and for awarding degrees but from the customers’ perspective, all of the departments should operate as one efficient unit, locspoc
To be fair: before this gets out of context, there was nothing in my blog to say marketers don’t listen. I said:
“But do marketers care enough about regular two-way conversations with stakeholders? Probably not as much as PR bods, who are charged with caring about what all audiences say about their clients, wherever they say it …” (You can debate who listens more, but I didn’t say marketers don’t listen).
I stated some admiration for the marketing profession:
“I don’t have the energy to become a marketer, too. But I know the marketing discipline would add definite strengths to some social media projects.”
And ended my blog saying social media could best be a multi disciplinary role.
Should have made it clear I wasn’t disagreeing with what you said. I have the utmost respect for you and the PR profession, I just decided to take a position to see where this debate would end up. Your original post was fantastic and really got me thinking about where this thing was headed.
Aw, I know that Mal – was just responding to Locspoc’s first line of his comment … just making sure others didn’t think that was part of my original post.
Cheers and thanks for reading my blogs in the first place!
sorry, i may have jumped the gun a bit haha anywho’s someone who doesn’t listen to their audience is just a bad marketer full stop regardless of what medium they use, it’s just annoying because i work in marketing too and i find that often people just take all of the bad points of whatever discipline it is whether it be sales, advertising or pr and they label it marketing and therefore marketing is bad and inefficient, but really it’s the difference between someone who is good at something and someone who is bad at it, like everyone who is bad at social media is labelled a marketer and everyone who is good at social media is a pr or social media expert or whatever, marketing isn’t the bad guy, it’s the people who practice it that give it life and definition, locspoc
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