Social Media Marketing Best Practice - my two cents

Helge Tennø tagged Piaras Kelly and myself a few weeks ago, as part of Mitch Joels’ Challenge to offer up one principle for Social Media Marketing Best Practice.

Coming from the client-side of marketing, within a large marketing team, my suggestion would be this:

'To truly get the most from social media, brands need to change the structure of their marketing team."

We need to move away from just pushing out campaigns. Getting a campaign out the door is an old way of doing things, but many marketing teams are still structured this way.

Who is responsible for responding to comments? Who is responsible for the fix if a customer is not happy or negative on your blog or social network? Apologising is not enough. Who is going to sign off the refund or a replacement product? Do we only talk to customers on our social network page when a campaign is live? But once we're onto another campaign, does the page become a ghost town? Tumbleweeds...

This is a team-structure thing. For many companies, Marketing and Customer Service are different departments. Different teams. Different objectives and different mindsets. One sends out messages to customers. The other takes in responses from those same customers.

That may have worked in past. New marketing involves bringing these two teams much, much closer together.