I won't abide it Jess!

Organisations need to spread their social media function across their business and stop thinking about it purely as a ‘task’ to be ‘managed’ by the marketing department.

That’s my reaction to Nina Hendy’s story in the SMH this week on the question of whether its appropriate for brands to outsource their social media programs to agency partners.

Outsourcing social media is ghost posting.  As voters, we don’t accept it from politicians and as consumers we shouldn’t accept it from business. As advisors to brands we should push back against it.

I don’t blame marketers that look to agencies to help them engage in social media.  In most cases, those outside of the marketing department are failing to ‘get’ the role of social media in business and an even smaller number are prepared (or they’re unable) to provide resources (human or $) in support of social media programs.  Social media has no mandate in many organisations, despite everyone’s general sense ‘that they should be doing something’.

‘It’s the marketing department’s problem’

In an ideal world (which is a place I hope we’ll eventually get to at least in the context of this issue) the responsibility for brand engagement within social media is insourced, its shared amongst multiple departments within an organisation i.e. customer service, product development, sales, product management etc.  These  customer facing functions or specific individuals within them would represent the organisation in accordance with a set of social media policies.

Responsibility for social media engagement is built into job descriptions.  The organisation is demonstrably open and communicative, it has a scalable engagement strategy that doesn’t come to a screaming halt because the marketing manager is on holiday or the agency has used up its retainer for the month!

It’s authentic. Employees learn directly from customers.  The list of advantages goes on.

In fact, I’d argue that the marketing team shouldn’t be engaging in social media as brand representatives.  Consumers want to hear from specialists in their field with the authority to take action and provide information, in the same way that media and analysts don’t want to speak to marketing people.

The role of the marketing team in this best practice scenario is to create the strategies and the policies, oversee the process, advise on issues, create content, track results and design and deliver training content. 

And the role of the agency?

The agency (probably PR agency):

• Supports the marketing team by providing advice, creative ideas and scalability across each of these areas
• Plays a key role as an advisor in the event of a reputational issue or crisis.
• Is responsible for managing the social media monitoring program, including benchmarketing
• Provides the client with advice on strategy as the program evolves
• Provides direction and inspiration in the form of campaigns that supplement day to day engagement
• Creates content for the program
• Delivers training and advises on trends and developments in social media

Simples!

This is best practice (if you ask me).

Fundamentally, I believe that employees should be representing organisations in social media, not agencies.

Not only is it more authentic and credible, it will also provide your customers with a more valuable experience and most importantly, its sustainable.  Even better, if managed in the right way it can become a strategy for employee engagement.

Social media provides the opportunity to bring brands to life online by directly engaging with individual consumers – this is a whole-of-business function, which cannot be dependant on the unpredictable and often transient relationships that exist between client and agency.

Marketing people should be advocating this approach and they should be knocking on their CEOs door to make it happen.  For a case study, look at Ford Motor Company in the US, which has a goal to get 1% of its global workforce (2,000 people) active in social media sharing their own perspectives, experiences, thoughts and knowledge as Ford employees.

Tags: brands, engagement, SMH, socialmedia, strategy