Digital Street Journal

Geoff Livingston wrote a very important article on where social media services must be placed within an organization.  Actually, Geoff’s written several articles on this and I suggest you read them here, here, and here.

In the article, entitled “There is no social media department”, Geoff makes the case that social media should not by itself be it’s own siloed department.  I semi-made the case last year on Marketing Conversation.

But naturally, I have a caveat. First, within organizations, social media must first find its own voice.

That’s because all too often, the key personnel that already exist in organizations have yet to fully understand or appreciate what social media is about.  That’s why, for the hundredth time, social media marketing campaigns are too much push and corporate blogs aren’t trusted.  I continually see, and am amazed by, marketing communicators of various stripes show little interest in learning anything indepth regarding social media.

Many of these people are relatively senior and are in leadership positions in agencies or marketing departments.  In other words, they are the ones providing the direction of their company, division, or whatever entity they are a part of.  All too often these are the people who seek to create campaigns using traditional marketing practices (that can still work via traditional marketing vehicles) through channels that  social media provides.

And sometimes this is inevitable.  Waiting for conversations to start so you can engage at some point can take longer than watching paint dry.  That’s if the conversations start in the first place.  And clients aren’t paying you to wait, and wait, and wait. But they’re also not paying you to ineffectively use social media.

That’s why I say that, whether its within an organization or as a stand alone firm, social media must find its own voice.  It has to be allowed to create and carry out best practices, engineering successful stories that become case studies, tangible enough to outweigh the temptation by those who seek to treat it like anything else.

In the current environment, that’s a tough task.  It will be a challenge in many organizations.  Social media practitioners could end up battling for the influence that they should be accorded.

I don’t know what the short term answer is.  I don’t know if that means that it’s best for social media to temporarily be its own entity for a short time until others in the organization realize what it’s about and give credence to those that are becoming leaders within.   But I do know that somehow, social media must get its own voice.

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On a side note, I’d like to congratulate Geoff and the team at Livingston Communications have been acquired by the PR agency CRT/tanaka.  This is great news for Geoff and for all of us involved in social media.  In fact, what it shows is that social media can find its own voice and then become an integral part of an organization and not exist as its own silo.