This wasn’t necessarily a presentation I attended at iMedia, the Social Business Summit, or SXSW, but among the many brand people I got to meet, it was an extremely hot topic of discussion. The discussion was further fueled by something that happened the day before the Social Business Summit. If you hadn’t seen the news, an employee from a company called New Media Strategies, accidentally dropped an f-bomb on behalf of their client, Chrysler’s twitter account. As you can imagine, the employee was immediately fired and Chrysler let the agency go the following day.
Many of the brand people I met worked in various parts of the company, and something mentioned in the Ad Age article about the incident sparked a lot of discussion…
Turf battles over social media between marketing and communications have been an issue at the automaker — and other companies — for a few years. Early in the day after the tweet went out, Chrysler’s communications team was grappling to get hold of the details of the episode after bloggers and media began calling, in part because Chrysler’s marketing department controls Facebook and Twitter social-media accounts that are “consumer facing.” The communications department has separate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts that are meant to be “media facing.”
Many companies say the divide only serves turf and budget wars, not the brands. “All that has blurred, so it’s critical for communications and marketing to be coordinating and cooperating all the time,” said Stuart Schorr, VP-communications and public affairs at Jaguar-Land Rover North America. One of the issues creating the turf war, he noted, is which department gets the budget.
What I think we all discovered was social media is something that can’t be fit into a traditional box, as it has blurred the lines between paid and earned media, marketing and customer service, as well as transactional versus relational communications. I’m not sure anyone has figured it out, but everyone expressed frustration about how this confusion was causing issues within their companies (like the ones mentioned above).
The general perception is that social media is “cheap,” because sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube don’t necessarily charge you to be there. However, in order to do it right, you have to invest first in listening to conversations about your brand and industry… which isn’t easy, when there are over 1 billion tweets per week, 1 billion Facebook messages posted per day, or the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Imagine the resources it takes just to do this… and if you want to respond to any of these messages, that takes more resources – and as pointed out above, multiple resources across functions/silos.
Hopefully you can agree, at the very least, it takes a large amount of time and organization. Generally, brands are already heavily committed to traditional media – and spending money to outsource this work to traditional media agencies – because the “push my message through a one-to-many framework” has been in place for so long. Even more important, leaders aren’t yet prepared to organize new internal communications structures to deal with a “new” media which requires one-to-one relationships.
In the meantime, there are certain to be many, many more ethical debates (like this one – Should You Outsource Social Media?) about whether or not you should hire someone to manage customer relationships in social media on your behalf. Please tell us what your take in this debate is by commenting on this post.
