Getting out of the social-media silo.
This Advertising Age piece by Jonah Bloom is well worth a read, even if you’re not in advertising — or, for that matter, in marketing at all.
Here’s a key excerpt:
Social media isn’t a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It’s about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company. It’s about realizing that consumers are running the biggest recommendation service in the world and that, as has been tiresomely often repeated, they define the brand (no, this is not new; yes, this is becoming more obvious and important by the day). All thinking about product, customers and communications, needs to take this into account — it cannot sit in a silo.
Emphasis added.
Not every social media tool will be useful to every company, so it’s possible that your company doesn’t need a blog in particular, a Twitter account in particular, a customer wiki in particular.
But thanks to the dirt-cheap cost of many social-media tools and their ability to help you link arms with your customers / users / fans / people-who-care, you’d be silly not to think about how social media could help your efforts to do more business.
Not just your marketing.
Not just your customer-service.
Not just your selling.
Not just your branding-and-community.
Not just your internal collaboration.
But ALL of your efforts.
All of them.
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Related Posts about Using Social Media outside the Silo of Marketing:
- Social media across the enterprise.
- Social media and the acid-bath of ROI.
- The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else.
- Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.
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Photo by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, used under a Creative Commons license.
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7 Comments so far
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Completely agree with this. However, I often think that the Social Media “industry” (if there is such a thing…really I just couldn’t come up with a better term) is often siloing itself. Meaning: at every event, Im running into the same folks. We need to be branching out. I previously wrote on this at http://tinyurl.com/mfrpre
Good points, J.J.
Anytime you get a specialty that’s beholden to an “inside baseball” way of talking and thinking, you run the risk of stagnation and irrelevance.
It’s vital that social-media folks continue to challenge and be challenged by smart people across the spectrum of the business disciplines.
Organizations always want a paint-by-numbers kit. What they need are artists.
I think social media is changing the way we market and brand products, provide customer-service and collaborate. The social media medium just needs to evolve to where the medium (Twitter, Facebook, even Linkedin)is not the message.
What I’m seeing, is that the proliferation of too many options that seem to do almost the same thing (to be expected as the phenomenon matures) is fragmenting the market.
There’s still too much emphasis on the tools themselves. They are the method for getting us to where we need/want to be. They should just “be there,” invisible to a certain extent. When the medium matures, the tools will become less front and center, and users will be able to focus less on the method and more on the message.
Woody, I like your paint-by-numbers formulation. It’s sad but true that too many companies look for those types of answers, instead of assuming that, like with most things, hard work and real thought will be required.
Ann — I agree that many discussions among the social-media set end up being about the media themselves. Worse is when they get progressively “meta” — discussions about discussions about the best ways to discuss social media.
It’s like the early, hobbyist days of anything, I guess — like talking to ham-radio operators decades ago. At some point, though, we can hope that these discussions will fade into niches while the media themselves continue to flourish.
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