Last week Jim Tobin tagged me in an article on “Why Social Media Marketing is Hard for Corporations.” A very timely post, as this topic has been bantered about quite a bit in the back channel over the past couple of weeks between myself, Debbie Weil, CC Chapman, and others.
Sixty years of mass communication rules will take a long time to un-write no matter how hot social media becomes. Corporation cultures just don’t change very easily.
And to be frank — though more companies are engaging — it’s not an all consuming flood. Why? It flies in the face of everything we as marketers have been taught. Consider Jim’s post:
Professional marketers were trained to talk. They were the “spinners”, the ones who could come up with the talking points, the unique selling proposition. Whether a customer was ready to listen wasn’t a big concern. We just had to figure out what shows they were watching and hope they stayed on the couch.
Consider that the marketing discipline most impacted by social media is PR… And PR people are the most resistant to the changes demanded by this new era. Reluctant PR pros are really a reflection of the general conservative corporate CxO suite, which has been taught to control the message from the time executives entered business school all the way through to their last promotion.
The Adoption Curve
It’s early in the adoption curve. Social media is just beginning to ramp-up. Who knows how quickly it will accelerate, but is apparent that businesses are seriously considering social media. They are just beginning to adopt new media forms.
Right now in 2007 most corporate cultures work against the successful adoption of social media. But before adoption occurs on a mass level, companies have to want to move in that direction. Why are most companies resistant? These seem to be the greatest cultural barriers:
- There are not enough publicized social media successes yet. So why spend money on it? Industries with well documented successes, like the auto industry’s GM Fastlane blog, are seeing more new social media introductions. As social media successes become increasingly common, businesses will be forced to compete.
- Social media marketers talk about conversation, and their general disdain for profiteering. Businesses talk about ROI. Until businesses start seeing tangible ROI, they will not adopt… no matter how great the conversation is.
- Legal concerns about openness, transparency, etc. Legal counsel has to be neutralized by the corporation’s need to compete effectively in social media realms.
- The traditional mass marketer rejects the community engagement principles of social media. These resistant PR pros and marketers will have to change their stance, or be move into a different seat on the bus if companies are going to adapt.
With the current corporate culture when companies do engage, we have astroturfing incidents or blatantly contrived content that turns away potentially interested parties. Rare is the corporate social media effort that begins with instant success. This is both an education issue and a cultural issue.
As the S-curve ramps up over time and social media becomes more pervasive there will be little choice. Then social media principles will either be applied and learned, or avoided, resulting in brand damage.
For those of us in PR and marketing that already get it, our job is to evangelize and keep the lights on. Without a path, it is much harder to find your way. Thus the great challenge for social media marketers: How to enable businesses to successfully adopt the social media ethos while demonstrating ROI? More on the social media marketer’s role next week.
Related reading: Wanna pass the 2.0 Go?
Do you feel that social media has a place in ALL types of corporations? What about those that don’t have a particularly public face — those like, for instance, my employer, a managed eye car benefit/retail/optical laboratory concern, who, at the corporate level, need to sell themselves on more of a B2B level, rather than the unwashed masses. (Yes on the retail side of course they appeal more directly to the masses, but that’s not, by far, the largest aspect of the business.)
Conversations don’t happen from the top down. When I evangelize social media at my current employer, I either encounter the “tilted head – curious dog” look, or ham-fisted attempts to ape and mimic what’s happening organically on the social web.
Andrew: I actually think that B2B organizations have more to gain from social media than traditional consumer companies. First of all, they are required to develop very specific subject matter expertise to serve high dollar, niches. This gives them great fodder to blog about. The caveat is that their community of buyers is online. I have a link to a study on this topic which I’ll have to delve up.
Jim: NBC Universal is notoriously backwards on the content issue. Copyright protection is still the company’s mantra and it refuses to play in viral environments. NBC Universal has a tough road to hoe in this space.
Geoff
this is an excellent piece and certainly underscores some of the “inherent” and “evolving” challenges.
And when you talk about keeping the lights on and evangelizing, Id also add that in clearing the path we must always be showing progress, results and eventually the more holy grail of a robust and coherent total ( and likely quite different) ROI package. In the meantime positive and successful stories do help.
Finally, you have to wonder sometimes too if the impediment is more than organizational or cultural. There can also be a the threat-challenge-fear factor of unlearning and learning anew. Whether in social media or just generally in business and career training, that human instinct to stick with what we learned and know can be pretty strong.
Cant wait to read the rest!