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There Is No Social Media Department

When a new competency is embraced by a larger entity, it is the nature of a corporate organization to turn that group into a department. In fact, most PR and advertising agencies actively seek to build or acquire a social media department to meet the growing demand for conversational services (Silo image by eirikref).

The siloization of social media within communications departments and their agencies represents a strategic error.

Integration is the key. And I’ve said this before when I was a stand-alone social media firm.

Every marketing department, every communications function, each practice area, and all teams should have this capability.  And social media needs to stop being looked at as a new profession. Instead these tools should be regarded as something that just about any worker can use in their tasks. By nature there will be some folks who are better at it than others, and they will evolve as specialists (remember the investor relations and analyst relations specialist, the copywriter in the ad agency?).

The big issue we have to address as an industry – and CRT/tanaka as a subset – is cultural.  Dishing to the social media consultant an industrial revolution mentality.  This reflects corporate America’s legacy, and smart companies are evolving to become information age companies. Social media, the enablement of two-way conversations, should be something that companies seek to adopt across the line as part of this larger global trend.

The above is an abridged version of a post originally published on the CRT/tanaka blog. To read the next section of the post, “Stakeholders Don’t Distinguish Between,” visit the full post.