• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 27, 2010

Where’s that social media manager your company’s been looking for? “Most likely in your office,” Frank Eliason, SVP of Social Media at Citi, said Monday during a breakout session at OMMA Global.

Indeed, a company’s top brand influencer often works for the company in question, according to Pauline Ores, Enterprise Market Engagement Consultant.

But where, exactly? In marketing or PR, perhaps? Well, “PR people understand how to communicate,” said Marcy Cohen, Sr Manager at Sony Electronics.

Seeming to side with Cohen, Ores said: "Marketers know about pushing out."

"It’s not marketing, it’s not PR," Eliason said of social media. "It’s about the customer -- it’s about what they want."

Either way, "Everything is changing so fast -- You need someone who craves that," insisted Josh Karpf, Senior Manager, Digital Media Communications at PepsiCo. "Someone who understands and appreciates technology."

Sony Electronics, for its part, presently has two different agencies managing two different Facebook pages for the company -- a model that didn’t always sit well with Cohn, who “wasn’t a fan of anyone creating content for us.”

Karpf said Pepsi prefers to keep the creation of social media internal, because "No agency can do everything well."

Eliason, meanwhile, said Citi prefered to keep "real-time" conversations in-house.