Brand Marketing

By Nick Johnson - January 16th, 2013

This week’s Wednesday Update looks back at 2012, forward to 2013 – and highlights the one massive, critical, huge trend you can’t avoid this year.

2013: What to Expect

2013: What to Expect

Unsurprisingly, the web is littered with opinion pieces on how corporate social media is going to evolve in 2013. Ryan Holmes from Hootsuite thinks that social media is going to get increasingly embedded across more corporate departments (we do, too); Matthew Knell from AOL says that your social media team will add a dedicated content strategist (and we agree with that, as well); Rob Howard, CTO of Telligent says that business is going to move away from Facebook pages towards branded communities (we’re not sure about that one).

We also put together our views on the key trends for 2013, and wrote a short series of pieces on each trend (customer-centricity; accessible consumer; death of push marketing) back in September. Read more here.
 

Social media highlights from 2012

If you want a quick review of the big social media stories in 2012, The SEO Company have you covered with a nice infographic.Featuring Kony 2012, Anonymous being named Time’s ‘Most Influential Person’; June’s revelation that 33% of people are now tweeting while watching TV (hello, transmedia); Obama’s “This seat’s taken” response to Clint Eastwood; and Facebook’s inevitable billionth member. It was quite a year.

Laura Stampler at Business Insider has also put together a list of 7 corporate social media highlights from 2012. Old Spice and Taco Bell had a very humanizing argument; as did Oreo and AMC Cinemas. Bodyform responded to a rant on their Facebook page with a great video (which has now been seen over 3.5m times). Wal*Mart went along with a hijacking of their competition to have Pitbull play in one of their stores (inevitable competition winner - Kodiak, Alaska) and got lots of good publicity.
 

The one big important massive trend for 2013: Fire your Social Media Director

Well, according to Alex Williams over at TechCrunch. His argument runs that

1. Social Media Directors rarely know what they’re doing
2. The existence of Social Media Directors engenders a centralised, corporate, limiting structure around social - and that’s a bad thing

Williams links to a great article at SocialFresh pointing out that as social gets more important for business, one can’t afford to silo it any more. It’s got to cross departments (does that view sound familiar?).
The piece finishes with a list of 10 ‘wishes’ for the enterprise who is still stuck with a silo’ed, limited social media strategy. It’s worth a read (here).

But the big one is number one - “Start talking to each other.”

It’s critical that different departments start to work together more closely if social is going to be of most benefit for your company. It's necessary because your customer expects to talk to your business like it's another person, not a several thousand-strong conglomerate. And for that to work, you've all got to be singing from the same hymn-sheet.

And, once everyone works together, the benefits start to accrue quickly. True customer-centricity becomes possible. You know way more about your customer, and you can tailor your business to fit them. Your marketing will get more response, your customer service department will be quieter - you'll sell more stuff to a happier customer.

So - Marketing, Comms, HR, IR, Customer Service, Product Development: If you’re not already talking with your peers in those departments, you had better start quickly.

We wouldn’t go so far as to advise firing the Social Media Director. But we would ensure that #1 Priority for that person is getting that internal conversation happening.