Where Should Twitter Sit Within Organizations?
Twitter as well as other Social platforms is beginning to suffer from the “campaign” marketing approach that often exists in brand marketing. A recent story from@AdAge rightly calls out that so many brands fail to realize the potential of Twitter. This often holds true with Facebook, My Space and the like as well. In general, brands plan out their year, it includes a series of campaign pushes, and the agencies that support them are forced to define how “social” should fit into the campaign. In general, having social as a part of campaign planning that sits within a brand team or an interactive/media team presents an inherent flaw. Social is all about ONGOING DIALOGUE. It should be considered a part of the CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP (CRM) PLATFORM rather than just a communication channel. As such, when planning for social and twitter, the first step is to consider what role it plays in a brand’s wholistic view of CRM and how the communication channels of email, fan pages, apps, Twitter, etc. all combine to deliver ongoing points of dialogue with the consumer. THEN, the campaign pushes are simply experiences and offers that can help provide relevant outbound message content. That said, campaigns often only refresh quarterly at most. As such, a CRM strategy that includes social needs to have far more frequent dialogue. This dialogue should be guided by what consumers are sharing and saying…not merely by what the brand wants to tell them.
So…to achieve all of this, it becomes a challenge when the budgets sit within a team that can only make campaign decisions or at most annual decisions. So, where should the budget and subsequently management of an ongoing social interaction sit? In the instance of the dialogue being marketing and experience driven, rather than PR driven, perhaps the budget sits with the CRM team. Or, perhaps we revisit how budgets are set entirely and map out a multi-year budget commitment to social platforms that can ensure the funds are available throughout the year and across years to ensure that the commitment to not “going dark in social” can be achieved.
The article that I’m referencing can be found on AdAge at :
Brands on Twitter: 76% of Accounts Are Infrequent Users – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.