When it comes to social media innovation for Marketing tools, mediums, and technologies, the online debate between new technologists and fundamentalists continues. It’s time to step back, lower the emotional hype so the business leaders dependent on us can make a decision on how best to engage – we’re all on the same team. This is a complex decision in a tough economic time and as is the case for any other capital investment, some limits and expectations must be set. This post is equally targeted at Marketers, as it is to Decision Makers including the C-suite.
Emerging Technologies Follow The Leader – Marketing
In terms of momentum, it’s clear that Marketing as a profession and business domain is ahead of sales, finance, accounting, R&D, manufacturing, operations, customer service, and just about every other area in the enterprise. This is both in terms of understanding the power of social media, and unlocking its potential. It has been challenging for Marketing to carry this burden as up until recently, the value of social media technologies has been elusive or difficult to relate in terms decision makers need to hear. Marketing metrics in general are a hot topic in evaluating Marketing’s contribution to the business. And social technologies are so vast and far reaching that they must not be presented in emotional terms or its coolness factor, but instead must be articulated in measurable expected business return.
Marketing as a domain and profession has made great progress with metrics and has forged ahead to innovate and initiate a new liquid content in the dialog between connected parties (people, businesses, etc.) Only the Marketing domain has the ability to steward this new social world, guiding it to amplify the core message of the corporation and generate new value for the enterprise. And, of course, integrating initiatives in current projects that serve sales, events, lead generation, corporate brand, and so on. Now that social has got this far on bootstrapping, we need to take a breath, and understand where more focus and planning can take us on the road ahead. If done well, companies will have a good balance of investment, risk, return, and a path to increase investment as the business demands, and results indicate we should.
Relating The Unknown To The Known
I’m taking a little license calling this “emerging technology”, as it has been around for a while, now. Relevant to this discussion, however, the emergence of the interest, opportunity, concern or worry of CEOs and other C-suite executives in many cases has now become forefront. This isn’t bad, it’s just a function of the mainstream adopter jumping on board, and the readiness of the tools to deliver value.
Let’s look at the the technology adoption model of Bohlen, Beal and Rogers (Iowa State University) made ubiquitous by Geoffrey Moore in his book “Crossing the Chasm.” I’m using this model as I believe that it’s well accepted, and most of us have seen it before. By using this model, we can see where we are in the cycle, and also related to other technologies, such as the PC itself, and how it has added value to the enterprise.
While there’s a plethora of tools and platforms available today, there will be vast new innovations and technological entrants coming. Even though we can assume there are more advances and tools coming, in terms of the lifecycle, we’ve just entered the early majority stage. The early and late majority are likely to cycle back and forth creating an enormous long tail of perhaps 20 years or more. Waiting is not prudent, as it is too easy to fall behind to the point of never catching up.
Capabilities And Fundamentals
Internally, CEOs have a lot of knowledge and subject matter experts in their own Marketing organization. Marketers are likely already plugged into the potential of social media. They can help begin to list the kinds of programs, plans and initiatives to extend ongoing traditional Marketing effort. By that I mean Marketing has positioned the company, built it’s marketing communications plans, crafted its product messages and value propositions and so on. Any social media strategy a CEO invests in should be an extension of the core Marketing work done to date.
Ask your Marketers to provide the following:
- Outline a strategy in terms of how Marketing will use social media to extend the reach of the company’s marketing fundamentals already in place.
- Prioritize what new necessary capabilities must be contracted or hired to achieve that extended gain.
- Describe in terms of numbers(costs, metrics, and expected conversions into revenue) what the company can expect from the effort.
- Ask for high-level overview of the tools necessaryto measure results through various social media channels.
- Identify what external resources are required, and at what cost for new technologies, tools, contract employees, agencies. Ask how will they choose?
Organization Considerations
If you have a solid Marketing team and leader with equal seat in your C-suite, she/he should be able to deliver a compelling plan. If Marketing does not have that level of influence in your C-suite, right now is a good time to ask yourself, why not? Assume that your best Marketers will eventually leave if they are not recognized for their contribution to the business. And, ponder how will you ever compete with your competition that does have that level of marketing bench-strength parallel to your chief of sales, R&D, operations and finance?
Let me eliminate the obvious. R&D should be innovating products, finance should be driving fiscal policy and accountability, operations should ensure delivery, and sales should ABC (always be closing). If you assign social media policy to any other group than Marketing, expect your productivity and efficiency to fall overall to the dissatisfaction of stakeholders. No CEO wants sales to go down, finance to stop collecting money or operations to stop fulfillment. Social Media should be driving you to recognize the fundamental value of Marketing to your business.
If you truly don’t have Marketing bench-strength, stop now, consider why and how the culture has allowed this to happen. Develop a plan to change your company culture. The alternative is to miss the potential of social media. It doesn’t matter if your company is B2B or B2C, social is going to affect your business, and now is the time to engage. Hire one strong Marketing leader and build from there. Make sure that Marketing leader is empowered, and knows that the fundamentals come first in order to gain the most from extending those fundamentals into social media.
Moving Forward
The sky is not falling, and companies should not over-invest. Instead, engage and learn, then tune for optimal returns on the investment. However, companies should be investing now, and building plans to maintain that connection as social is the infrastructure of business in the future. Companies that don’t provide this infrastructure will be disadvantaged among competitors and the cost will continue to rise in order to catch up. Do it now.
Know that your Marketing effort is as critical to the business as any other domain – and, even more so with the advent of social technologies that can make all the difference to your customers. Your Marketing team has a fundamental new role to play – engage them and win.
