Social Marketing and Community Management are not the same thing
A company I used to work for recently posted a job for Director of Social Marketing to replace their Director of Community and it made me seriously sad.
Ages ago, I worked there as a Community Manager. Back then (you know, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people still printed out Mapquest directions) this was a new role in a new field. I reported to the Web Director, the thought being that I would be posting blogs and handling the forums — things that were on the Internet and thus the domain of the Web department.
My, have times changed.
Nowadays, a Community Manager could report to the Marketing department, the PR department, the Product department, or the Support department. (Sidebar: if you have a Community employee or team that reports into another kind of department, leave a note. I’m making a list.) Whenever I tell folks I originally reported into the Web department, people laugh. It seems random now, almost a decade later: other than posting on the interwebs and potentially knowing some code, there’s not a ton of overlap between those two teams.
Community Management has rapidly grown in popularity and importance among companies of all kinds in the past ten years, and with it, the responsibilities of the job have expanded significantly. The creation and growing importance of social media has complicated matters even more in this ever-changing, highly important field.
Let me be clear right now: Social Marketing and Community Management are not the same thing.
They are not interchangeable. One cannot replace the other. If you want to run a company that truly has good relationships with your fans and customers, you need to have both Social Marketing and Community Management.
How do I not only convince you that I’m right about this but also get you on board with my way of thinking? First thing’s first: let’s define Community Management and Social Marketing
Community Management as defined by the first little blurb that comes up when you Google the term is “An executive in the company who acts as the ambassador of a company or brand on the web. The community manager builds and monitors multiple communities generated in blogs, forums, social networks, etc. S/he becomes the authorised voice of the company.”
Breaking that down into bullet points, here are the non-negotiable qualities needed for effective Community Management:
- building, maintaining, and growing relationships with the community, fans, and customers
- creating value for people who participate in that community (be it content, events, or otherwise) as well as to interest non-community members and bring them into the fold
- be the liaison between community and company
- be the spokesperson for and to the community
Here’s the definition for Social Marketing:
As you can see, this definition is not what folks think about when they say “Social Marketing” in a tech company these days (although the definition is applicable to work they do.) Let’s refine that search to Social Media Marketing, which is defined by Google as “Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach.”
Breaking Social Media Marketing down into bullet points, it’s all about:
- raising awareness of your brand, company, or product
- growing your fan base and increase your footprint on whatever platform you are using
- generating buzz and getting people to do things : whether that’s buy a product, tweet a hashtag, share a link, go to your website, or whatever else
Another sidebar: I have serious qualms with shortening the name “Social Media Marketing” to “Social Marketing.” While some companies like to laugh and say “oh titles? They don’t really matter” they actually really do. Think through the titles that you give your departments and employees so that they actually convey their goals and responsibilities. It will help not only the people who work in those fields but everyone else, inside and outside of the company, who are trying to figure out how to work with them. As you can see by the definition of “Social Marketing” above, it has very little to do with the bullet points I listed. I get it: the term “social media” is so 2013, dropping part of it makes your team sound less sleazy. How about instead of tricking yourself (because you aren’t tricking anyone else) that your team isn’t just a bunch of social media buffoons that the world snickers at these days (like used car salesman, but on the Internet!) you find a way to adapt your social media strategy such that it’s a quality one.
Social Marketing is all about broadcasting out to customers and potential customers. It’s primary objectives all revolve around one-way communication: the company speaks to people in hopes that they do stuff for the company and in turn the company grows and sells more of whatever it’s talking about.
Community Management is all about dialogue to fans and customers. You’ll note that I changed that group up from “potential customers” to “fans.” I did that on purpose. Community Management acknowledges that some of the people it speaks with and spends time with will never spend any money and that’s okay: Community Management is building a healthy community that will sustain the product or brand they are working for. Healthy communities have a diverse mix within their populations, which includes non-customers. You need that.
Who these teams report to and exactly what the scope of their responsibilities are varies depending on your company’s needs and goals (and I have thoughts on that, but that’s an entirely different article.) No two companies structure their org charts the same way — certainly not when you get into the nitty gritty of scope of duties. That’s besides the point.
You cannot jettison dialogue with your community for the bullhorn technique that is social marketing.
When done well, both departments are valuable and necessary for a company to thrive.
Both Social Marketing and Community Management are going to continue to rapidly evolve in the coming years They’re still young fields and we’re still in the infancy of the empowered consumer who has easy 24/7 access to speak directly to brands and influence people in charge of those brands . Both of these areas are going to keep increasing in importance and they are going to have to mature and develop as the landscape changes.
But they are not the same thing. You can’t swap one for the other. You can’t decide one is more important than the other: they go hand-in-hand like PR and Marketing, two departments that are so similar and yet so very, very different.
If I told you to get rid of PR for Marketing because they’re “basically the same thing” you’d laugh at me.
Treat both of these teams with the respect they deserve. Your entire community is talking: make sure you’re paying attention.
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