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:
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.
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.
Once again, another thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, Kendall. I will read it again (probably more than once) and share it with others.
Thank you for expanding my awareness, my thinking and my knowledge base.
Social media should be delegated to someone who really understands it's uses, power and attraction. Here at BroadbandVideo, Inc. we have a 13 year old boy with a skin condition who goes by the handle "BabeMagnet69" who really seems to get it.
Who owns word of mouth? For all practical purposes they're the same thing.
Social media should be woven into fabric of all marketing channels, including customer service, strategically managed from 360 perspective by the CMO.
Social media started in town squares. It evolved to letters to the editor. On to the radio station request lines in the 1950's. Talk radio and music request lines are social media. Online it started with the AOL / Compuserve chat rooms and bulletin boards in 1983.
What is absolutely true is that because big agencies have a big need to assign "ownership" and they mostly have not done that, social media is underutilized and underbudgetted. Instead there are endless meetings of strategy of whose in charge and nothing gets bought or sold. Billions are wasted in traditional media getting less results than any online video campaign would get---but gee, who is going to "own" that without fear? Just the smart ones.
We are here to sell stuff. Social media sells stuff.
When, social media, got out from the marketing umbrella? Marketing --or the CMO in specific-- is in command. The CMO certainly will delegate such tasks.
@Jonathan Mirow, is legal to hire a 13 years old boy? Like if all your taks to reach Baby Boomers need to be done by 50+ years old.
Who owns the post office? Whoops. When someone takes the time to buy you a card and send it, then you have it in your hand, what can be more social than that or even a personal handshake? Who owns the gesture? No one source should own it. FedEx/Big Brown it.
On the mark, Kendall. I could hear the knives sharpening for a turf war any minute ;-).
Each department has an element to manage, but it's all about communication.
Merry Christmas-mc
No one can own a conversation. You can control some conversations within and about an enterprise, but if your customers are talking about how your call center can't do anything right, while the marketing folks are playing "Shiny Happy People," you've got a big problem. Any customer-touching part of a business needs to be SM empowered, and SM savvy. If each and every one of your peeps can't walk and talk your brand's story, you're juggling lit matches in a gasoline sea...
You make some great points, and you hit the nail on the head with the last sentence: "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." At Media Logic, we've come up with a product, Zeotgeist & Coffee, that's intended to get past the awkwardness to help organizations efficiently tap into their collective brainpower and social energy. If you're interested in learning more, check it out at: http://www.mlinc.com/products/zeitgeist/
This article is spot on. A relevant follow up could focus on the flipside--the false idea held by many small to midsize companies on tight budgets that that social media CAN simply be assigned to one person. While management in general now sees the importance of SM, they don't fully grasp the workload of monitoring, targeting, directing creative, creating content and conversing with the world. A common solution for many organizations is to simply add "manage social media" to an existing job description.
I totally agree. Collaboration is still in its infancy. I work with small and large business daily helping them develop their social media strategic plans. Despite their desire to jump in head first, they are still treading water with who will do what, when and where.
To conquer this, I teamed up with Midlands Tech College in Columbia, SC to design and teach three certificate programs in Social Media for Business, Social Media for HR Professionals and Internet Marketing. These programs will go into depth to answer the question of who will do what, when and where.
Dr Dave Hale
The Internet Marketing Professor