Over the weekend I’ve been involved in an interesting conversation with some very savvy and experienced marketers hailing from all corners of our industry from advertisers to PR gurus to social media agencies, large and small, academic and business. While most of my colleagues identify and call out the issues constraining social media fairly well there seems to be a lack of big a picture overview, at the topographical mapping level.
Within the marketing communications industry there is a fundamental lack of understanding about social media in both businesses and organizations from the Fortune 10 through start-ups to government, political and military organizations.
A recent Accenture survey found 60% of CMOs believe SM will lead to new revenue streams while only 8% of CEOs are willing to invest in SM programs. The delta is the exactly the lack of understanding and ability to measure and plan SM programs with proper process and metrics.
Much of the problem is exacerbated, if not caused, by marketers, advertisers, public relations folks (like me) and especially the so-called social media specialists.
PR folks do not understand and treat SM much like another set of traditional media channels through which they attempt jam supply-side or push messaging, just as they’ve always done, through traditional media properties. In fact much of my business is consulting to global PR agencies’ regarding SM and even though they all have “SM” practice areas their collective understanding of how their clients need to be engaging within the Social Biosphere is seriously lacking. Most big agencies are fairly good at building blogger and SM site lists but that’s generally where their expertise drops of the deep end.
Remember I’m speaking here about the 90% of the bell curve, so obviously there are exceptions to what I’m saying.
The SM specialty shops are primarily focused on the tactical and technology aspects of SM and can build you FaceBook, Tumblr, SU, Twitter, WordPress and 20 other properties you’ve never heard of (and neither will most of your customers) but have little or no real understanding about the strategy, business goals and processes needed to drive any successful communications engagement.
Our old friends the advertisers perhaps pose the greatest barrier to advancing the SM cause since a truly functional Social Biosphere is an anathema to the ancient and fortified traditional ad-approach to business. After all who needs a multi-million dollar ad campaign when the conversations you need to influence are already taking place and simply awaiting your participation? Of course the problem is traditional advertisers have all the marketing money and power and will fight to the death to keep things the way they are.
One of the issues I continually run into when speaking to traditional “big PR” are metrics. Our industry, PR, has traditionally been absolutely abysmal at developing measurement and ROI processes for our clients and coupled with our lack of understanding and outright fear of the Social Biosphere, we fail miserably at delivering consistent and replicateable ROI and business processes for our SM clients.
My experience continually demonstrates a fundamental and strategic lack of understanding of what the Social Biosphere is and how best to integrate and operate within this frightening new socialized frontier with legacy business models. Add to this that most of the “experts” have a huge vested interest in maintaining the status-quo of communications and those evangelists for SM tend to be younger professionals with little or no knowledge apart from the tactical and technical and we’ve got some serious barriers to overcome before the Social Biosphere realizes its true potential as a business environment.
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