3 Trends in Integrating Social Media

Brands are doing three important things to get ready for this change:  

• Demanding that their agencies - big and small - step in to train their internal marcom teams on thinking through the application of social media. Look at the number of "digital days" held at brands. We did an important one at Unilever in December on social media-based word of mouth marketing. P&G did their Digital Day, J&J had their Babycamp. We have at least 2 more coming up for various brands.

• Hiring evangelists from the early adopters or growing them from within. Ford has Scott Monty. Pepsi has Bonin Baugh. Dell has Liana Frey. Kraft has Andy Markowitz. These experts go through a useful and predicatble transormation. They start as "the social media guy/gal" that everyone tries to get in their meetings. Slowly but surely, they turn to training internally out of the need to scale their expertise across the organization (either that or they do it out of sheer self-preservation. Once you create the social media hunger inside an organization, the only way to feed it is clone yourself.

• Training internal marcom staff across disciplines in social media marketing integration. We are not talking about "social media 101", here. Brands see the discipline-busting effect of social media. They are training advertising-driven brand managers in public relations and social media marketing. Likewise, they are training the communications staff to apply the value of paid media to an overall program. This is the most emergent of trends and I expect it to grow ten fold this year. Brands need a new breed of marcom expert. The marketing and PR schools (including where I teach at Johns Hopkins) are just starting to train across disciplines and train in social media. It's up to brands to invest more in training than perhaps they did a few years ago. The good news is that training a great marketer in planning and using social media is easier than training a social media pundit to be a great marketer.

More changes on the way.....

Comments

[Rob Murray]

Its true.

In the UK the BBC recently held Beebcamp which was a gathering of bloggers/digital industry supremos, internal and external. See here http://bit.ly/beebcamp2

[Ian Cook]

think you are spot on here and your thoughts echo a blog we wrote recently about the Lack of Understanding is 'Obstructing the growth of Digital PR' perhaps you might like to comment on this?

http://tinyurl.com/clrzsa

[Michael Daehn]

"The good news is that training a great marketer in planning and using social media is easier than training a social media pundit to be a great marketer."

YES!

Great post.

[Robert Lönn]

I can only agree with the speaker above and I am so looking forward to the days where we see less dumb TV commercials. Cause that must be the effect of refocusing the marketing teams to include social media.

[David Breznau]

Thank you. The more sanity the better. I've referenced your thoughts. Thanks.

[Mishy79]

Thank you for this information. Companies that are not embracing social media tactics will soon find themselves stale. Whether the companies can florish using social media or not, it is properly positioning themselves within that which makes a difference.

[Denis]

We are doing something similar here in Italy... I hope it goes well! Surely we need more barcamp, brandcamp, barbrand,etc...