Deciding who takes the lead on social media is one of the biggest questions that big brands (and lesser mortals) are facing today. I recently wrote a post about the best social media management structures for large organisations, highlighting the point that moving towards 'holistic' social media management is a process of evolution that shouldn't be rushed. Yet, whether they acknowledge the fact or not, the battle for control of social media is already raging within most organisations, with the biggest point of friction existing between Customer Services and Marketing.
I've long been an advocate of "enlightened" social media marketing (based on trust and value) yet as a Marketer, no matter how helpful you are, your reason for being is, fundamentally, to generate customer leads. At some point, no matter how helpful you are, you must sell your products. As a Marketer, your boss is the bottom line, everything else is a value-add.
Customer Services, on the other hand, exists to promote the happiness of the customer. As a Customer Support operative your goal is to retain customers by championing their needs and grievances within the company. As Frank Eliason (SVP Social Media, Citi) said - emphatically - at Social CRM New York in November, "when you're in Customer Care, your boss is the customer!"
With this in mind, and while I prepare for my London conference on Social Customer engagement on 29th March (at which Frank is the afternoon Keynote) I was interested to read Joshua March's post on The Social Customer "2012: The Year Social Marketing and Social Customer Service Get Cosy". Josh, who heads up the social engagement platform Conversocial, was also a speaker at Social CRM New York and I agree with a lot of what he says in this article. There's no doubt that in most companies that Marketing is still leading the charge with social media - and yet, to my mind, there's also no doubt that the future lies with Customer Services.
I would go further, though. I would say that greatest opportunity for businesses to profit from social media exists in customer service driven strategies. To reap the word-of-mouth/referral benefits that customer happiness produces, the customer perspective must be central to the initial strategy. Put another way, companies that allow Marketing to drive their social media strategies are stepping off on the wrong foot - and may end up on the wrong track altogether.
This may be a question, not about businesses, but about the evolution of business on the Internet. Many businesses are still engaged in a virtual land-grab for online market share and "share of voice". In such a phase they might be excused for emphasising marketing over customer care. Perhaps when the online space settle down, with a few large incumbents in each industry, we'll see a greater keenness to focus on customer happiness. The problem with this is, online reputations stick like mud: get it wrong today and there's no guarantee consumers will give you an opportunity to redeem yourself tomorrow.
I'll be discussing strategies, tools and techniques for social customer engagement with Frank Eliason (Citi), Bian Salins (BT), Guy Stephens (CapGemini), Martin Hill-Wilson (Brainfood) and others at The Social Customer in London on 29th April. I hope you can join us for what promises to be a fascinating day.