Yesterday, I spoke on a panel to over 100 of Cisco’s global marketing professionals with Jennifer Jones of the famed Marketing Voices podcast, and Nancy Bhagat of Intel’s integrated marketing department. Jennifer who is known for assembling the greatest social media marketers on her podcast is now doing a great job coordinating real world panels with some of those same folks. Nancy, who has increased her integrated marketing budget 40% to online (that’s amazing!) shared a fantastic case study of how Intel is embracing customers using social media, while meeting their objectives, or learning from mistakes.
“So, who owns social media?”
One member of the Cisco global audience asked a question around the concept of social media ownership. Although he didn’t ask the following questions specifically, many corporations are having a hard time answering who manages the tools, who manages the relationships, what do you do it analyst blog, press blogs, or customers blogs, and who controls the budget and headcount.
Past: Marketing as the Controller
In the past, marketing has been much of a controller; responsible for direction one-way communications through advertising and press releases, this is how it was safe. The books Cluetrain and Naked Conversations tell this story well. During this time, there was a very thick membrane around the sides of the company that prevented employees that were not in this central group to openly talk to customers and the market. That’s all going away.
Future: Marketing as the Enabler
One of the concepts that I enjoyed from Nancy was her perspective and approach, how marketing is now an enabler. That solid communication membrane is now blurred, as adoption of social media tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, are really going to drive this, esp at the younger generation) and in order to do their job, many employees must interface with others using these tools. Marketing becomes a group that enables other groups in the company through leadership, education, setting up social media workshops, and letting go a great deal of control to product teams, support, sales teams, and other client groups that will start to use these tools to communicate.
Many challenges
Of course there are some real challenges: real-world (positive and negative) conversations (two-way, not one-way) will be decentralized (most off the corporate website), so marketers need to take leadership to understand the many different community discussions and respond. Now don’t get me wrong, marketers still have power, I continue to express that the power has shifted to the participants, so in addition to enabling, marketers must participate. For some marketers this will be a challenge, but by doing this, they will become more relevant.
[To be successful, corporate marketers must shift from controlling to enabling business groups to use social media to connect with customers]
In my research, I’ve found that successful companies have at least two new roles, the Community Manager (focuses on interactions with the community) and the Social Media Strategist, who helps to work internally to drive adoption, evangelize, and prove value. More on that as I dive into that research.
Your perfect and on the mark when you say that marketing is about to evolve just like it did a few years back.
Social Media brings a new mix to the marketing puzzle and isnt “dumb” so thats a good development indeed.
Unless marketers evolve, they will all become defective!
Jeremiah, Great to be on the panel with you. Thanks for your kudos on the show and my bringing us all together. It was a blast. Nancy is totally on-point with her thoughts on marketers being enablers…and in my opinion strategic marketing is going to have to figure out how to include customer service more closely into their infrastructure.
Just finished reading “Meatball Sundae” by Seth Godin, so this is quite perfect timing. And to echo what he wrote in his book, it’s not just “marketing” that has to change, but the whole foundation of the corporation.
But completely agree that the power has shifted to the consumer. And I think it’ll just continue shifting. Corporations need to adapt, and soon.
Jeremiah
I am not convinced that Marketing is the right function to lead social marketing, nor that the hub and spoke model with Marketing at the centre (as I believe you imply) is the right structure either.
The Marketing function is still largely about inside-out, product push, even if the marketing concept isn’t! This remains the dominant logic even in the customer-centric companies I have workd with.
And I see few signs that Marketing is ready to cede any real power (to influence) to their customers either. Despite the fact that customers have already taken it some time ago!
Paradoxically, social marketing is about much more than just marketing; it is about getting customers involved in driving innovation, in selling through their own social networks and about serving themself long after the sale is over. Through the entire product usage period, where value is created for the customer.
That is a pretty tall order for most Marketing functions. They are not customer-centric, they fool themself into thinking they are still in charge of the brand and they are not influential enough in their parent organisations to drive collaboration.
Perhaps this is one of the times that a Chief Customer Officer in the role of a ‘social media conductor’ is required. Someone who can orchestrate all the different functions within the organisation to benefit from the insights social media should and can generate. And to bring the world of the customer inside the organisation.
What do you think?
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager
Great to see you, Jeremiah, and Jennifer at Cisco. What an amazing place and great, energetic group of people there at Cisco!
I get to work with Nancy’s team inside Intel, and it was nice to see how much things have changed in that past two years — and how we still have much to learn.
Graham and Derrick make some interesting points in the comments section (Oh, I gotta finish my “Meatball Sundae”!).
Social media/networking is changing not only marketing but it is forcing many different teams work more closely together because audiences, customers, people in general are engaging more. These “audiences” are satisfied when they can get what they need immediately when they want it — what is your product, how does it work, where do I buy it, how do I get it fixed? From inside a company, you may have to go to the marketing department, reseller or channel team and costumer service group to get all of those questions answered properly. “Audience” centric professionals inside companies are breaking down business group silos to integrate across teams, pulling together experts and skills that meet audience needs. Sure employees are paid to “generate demand,” but meeting audience needs generates demand.
So in some respects, its not about marketing or another particular group “controlling” but “leading” efforts inside their company. These efforts are audience-centric, and the efforts are about helping employees (and their vendors) in every business group understand best ways to participate with social media and social networks. Leading by example and leading by offering easy-to-understand, up-to-date explanations of a company’s approach (i.e. honest, trustworthy) and how the company is using the tools. And strongly encourage employees to climb up the Social Technographical Ladder (Charlene Li, Forrester) so they become enthusiastic participants.
Jeremiah,
It sounds like you had a great panel!
Graham – I love this definition, “social marketing is about much more than just marketing; it is about getting customers involved in driving innovation, in selling through their own social networks and about serving themself long after the sale is over. Through the entire product usage period, where value is created for the customer.”
Marketing is more than just the sale: it’s consideration of the customer everywhere in the buying cycle (including after the purchase).
The Community Manager can connect customers with internal functions depending on their needs. And integrating customer feedback into the dev’t cycle early on is a powerful option for guaranteeing that you’re building a product that your customers want/need.
Graham
I’m not sure if I see marketing as a hub and spoke management model of social media either. The future will have nearly every employee with the ability to communicate with customers and prospects, so it’s not even feasible.
Perhaps what would be best is for marketing to teach, guide, and be a resource to the company, rather than a central air traffic control tower.
Great topic. We’ve been working on this throughout the year. As Ken mentions above we’ve been establishing new relationships between marketing and business units. We are moving away from marketing being the gatekeeper and strict managers of online messages. Marketing is becoming more focused on enablement and proliferation social media best practices, buzz generation opportunitieses and online campaigns.
It’s not been an easy journey but we are seeing success.
Why not marketing? The point is marketing as an enabler.
Jeremiah, your suggestion of marketing to “teach, guide, and be a resource to the company,” is spot on. That’s what we’ve done at Intel.
Its a natural in many ways… more so than PR or IT. Not sure who else is better suited, resourced or positioned as most marketing orgs own their respective corp.com’s anyway.
Found your blog while researching Intel marketing/media mix for an MBA paper. Good stuff. Not a lot out there on this subject. Thanks