The idea that the people most passionate about social media would “take ownership” seems like it would be a natural step, but at the same time, I believe (and agree with Mike) that there must be guidelines in place for organization-wide efforts. Going a step further, there also must be a grounded strategy in place as well, i.e. why are we blogging, what is our goal in tweeting, what do we hope to contribute and achieve through our social media efforts, how will this help our business and the consumers/clients we serve.

Again, great to hear other opinions and takes on this topic!

Top-down support is essential, but I think for many organizations, getting the CEO to lead the efforts, while a worthwhile goal, isn’t always going to be realistic.

Chris and I agree completely in principle, but I think at the beginning stages a company may well need someone to help drive social media policies, strategies, training and engagement. That’s what I do and why my title is Social Media Manager, although I’ve known since the start that in somewhere between six and 24 months, that’s going to sound kind of silly.

But I’ll be out of business cards by then.

I am the former head of Digital Marketing for Microsoft and I’d like to provide my two cents because this is 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 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.

My view is initially it should be centralised to ramp up capability, learning and experience but in parallel this same team would also be charge 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’? It would take years 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 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 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 and disciplines be responsible for leading the development of strategy, 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, not mutually exclusive.

Regards,
Martin

Joseph Kingsbury, Text 100