Marketing Through Social Media

A leader in the field of social marketing recently asserted in a twitter post that if customer service isn't involved in your social marketing efforts then you are doing it wrong.

He is absolutely right.

My experience with social media is that most organizations don't know how to really take advantage of social media. The leaders of many organizations only know the basics of social media, as a result they choose to assign it to some department, often marketing, and then announce that they are involved in social marketing.

You see the term social marketing is misleading. Social Marketing is an opportunity for your organization to build direct relationships with your customers, employees, potential employees, suppliers, . . . everyone that your organization comes in contact with. To ask just the marketing department to harness this entire potential as an island within a whole organization is a near impossibility.

The way to organize social media is different for every organization, but the truth remains the same, multiple aspects of your organization need to be involved. I would even suggest that the reason some of the organizations that use social media the best is because the organization is still small enough that those involved are involved in understanding the overall objectives and strategies of the organization, and whomever is involved in the social media can use that direction in administrating the social media efforts.

To make social media start to work for your organization begin by establishing a consistent voice. Get input from all aspects of your organization, find out what information they want presented to their "customers" and run with it.