Three Marketing Models for Social Media (via @adage)

A look at how Ford, Kodak and Best Buy run their programs:

CENTRALIZED

The social-media department functions at a senior level, reporting to the CMO or CEO, and is responsible for all social-media activation for the brand. “We work with a lot of clients that have appointed one person,” said Ketchum’s Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social media strategy. “It’s nice to have a celebrity; it puts a human face on a company. You can achieve that by having one person being the public face both externally and internally, but it can get distracting because it becomes about those people.”

Dangers: Having a social-media head means departments outside that person’s scope might not benefit from efforts in the medium. For example, is customer care being considered if social media is centralized under marketing? This model doesn’t necessarily take into consideration social media’s influence on the entire business.

Essential roles: The social-media lead.

Marketers with this model: Ford. Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications director, joined the automaker from social boutique Crayon and has been a visible proponent of social media for the brand. Mr. Monty operates within the corporate-communications department, which reports directly into Ford’s CEO.

DISTRIBUTED

In this setup, no one person technically owns social media. Instead, all employees from customer care, marketing, media and beyond are represent the brand and work social media into their roles. This is often implemented through training and encouraging social media use across an organization.

Dangers: If there’s no standardized practice, social media can veer a brand off-message. For example, Jet Blue Senior VP-Marketing Marty St. George brought Twitter into the agency-of-record pitch process — tweeting the news of the search to see how many agencies were digitally savvy enough to find it there. “That experiment is over — and not to be repeated!” he tweeted after his tweet blew up into media coverage. Without a leader, learning about new social technology or sites then also falls on individuals.

Essential roles: Senior leadership that champions social media; training and internal communications around social-media policy is necessary.

Marketers with this model: Best Buy is decentralized because everyone in the organization has a role in social media, as Twelpforce demonstrates. Any employee can sign up to respond to customer queries on Twitter. The retailer does, however, have protocol and guidelines in place for tweets, and it has social-media experts in marketing. Last summer, CMO Barry Judge crowd-sourced a job description for a senior manager-emerging media marketing. Brands like IBM, Intel and Kodak have published social-media policies.

COMBINATION

This involves centralized best practices and decentralized execution. A brand maintains a committee of social-media stakeholders to work up its position and voice, which it disseminates to the company at large. From there, each discipline is left to incorporate social media into its individual executions.

Dangers: How do you hold departments accountable to a research council? Also, when a social-media program goes sour, who ends up as the fall guy, those who built the social-media strategy, or those who implemented it?

Essential roles: A team of social-media experts plucked from various departments.

Marketers with this model: Ketchum’s Mr. Bellinger cites his client Kodak as a company that’s found a good balance. It employs Jenny Cisney, chief blogger, in marketing, but she’s tasked with steering the company’s social-media presence rather than own it entirely. Kodak has published online its social-media policy for employees within a guidebook for marketers looking for lessons in social media. Starting in 2005, IBM used a wiki to crowd-source guidelines for a company blog and has asked employees to collective revise the rules for new forms of social media. Those efforts ultimately feed back to IBM’s social-media head Adam Christensen, who most recently spearheaded the company’s Smarter Planet blog.

via adage.com

Posted via web from Ryan Moede