There's been a lot of talk lately about
exactly who should own social media inside the agency or within the brand or client organization. Who leads, who executes and who's accountable for
performance of social media programs? It's clearly debatable.
If we look around, we will find social media living inside the media department, the creative studio, within account planning, at
the desk of PR, and even in the intern's bullpen. Further, it's often partially or wholly outsourced to third parties mirroring that same swinging range of categories. It's all over the place.
This groping for location seems to have intensified as agencies and companies work to mature their approaches to social media, recognizing that it's more than tweeting links to news stories,
running social ads on Facebook, rounding up a few fans, or troubleshooting customer service issues via Twitter and calling it a day.
I'm convinced that the amorphous organizational existence
of social media has also spawned the return of an urge in certain industry circles to rename it -- indicative of the lingering tension around pinning it down as a discipline. On one hand, we
acknowledge that precise nomenclature and definitions are essential to advance a discipline, especially one that's actually been around and evolving since the '90s. On the other hand, the quest to
locate an organizational niche and name or rename social media does not accomplish much.
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Rather than obsess on finding a singular home for this discipline, I believe we'd do well to back
up, look at our workflow and think about how we can collaborate. Here are a few considerations that come to mind:
The life force of social media is the consumer, propelled by interest,
demand, influence, engagement and congregation. So, with or without the marketer's guiding hand, once initiated to any degree, social media will take on a life of its own. Thus, making sure that
consumer research and insights have a place in media program development is key.Social media has a place in the integrated digital mix, across search, display, etc. It's also worth
noting, as with these other media, that visual creative may also play a part. As ever, it's critical that media and creative conspire within any given program. All the more reason not to isolate
social media from creative functions within the org.If we think of social media as a channel with various platforms and conduits -- blogs, social networks, sharing tools, micro-blogging
-- it's important to understand the intricate mechanics and limits of each. Full-fledged social media, leveraging a real mix, is collaborative by nature. Fueled by consumer behaviors
and affinities, there is interplay across platforms. So, too, must we play nice with each other and collaborate, as we develop and run these programs.Our ability to properly organize and
have our teams thrive around research, planning, execution, measurement, etc., correlates to our ability to do the same with social media. If our org is already a mess, rife with cross-department
dysfunction, social media as a practice will get lost in the shuffle.
It's important that those responsible for research, PR strategy, planning and creative all get that they have a
part in the equation. Consumer insights; messaging strategies and platforms; playbooks; buzz tracking; reputation monitoring -- all are in our collective hands.I think of the practices of
online audience development of yesteryear, when message-board seeding, interactive PR and online guerrilla marketing were commonplace. There certainly wasn't much rumbling back then about where this
stuff lived. It just wasn't an important conversation to have. We were simply getting our feet wet.
But now that our cross-platform digital infrastructure has reached such scale, and each
platform bears so many options, the pronounced attention to where social media should live has forced the issue of productive agency collaboration. Unfortunately, as we reach what might become the
heyday of social media in 2010, collaboration is still more awkward than we might like to admit.