Manhattan Marketing Maven

5 Beach Books for Marketers

Tired of James Patterson, Steig Larrson, Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele? Consider reading these six recently published beach-ready marketing books written by working entrepreneurial practitioners that reveal interesting perspectives, war stories, best practices and unique voices. 

With a broad range of insights and expertise ranging from corporate strategy to nuts-and-bolts checklists, the authors seek to simultaneously unburden themselves, promote and differentiate their agencies and give back to the profession. Each one draws on personal experience, cites client cases or quotes clients and articulates their personal greatest hits.

Some offer cautionary tales, illuminate disasters and describe the one that got away. All evidence a genuine understanding of the business. So if you are comfortable using a highlighter on the beach check these books out. 

Full disclosure: I got all these review copies for free. I don’t know any of the authors, though Jim Joseph interviewed me once and didn’t hire me. Books are reviewed in alphabetical order according to author’s last names. 

CONSUMED – Rethinking Business in the Era of mindful Spending

By Andrew Benett & Ann O’Reilly 

This book grew out of the “New Consumer” global survey of 5700 adults in seven countries, the results of which are wrapped around interviews with Havas clients and punctuated with a mountain of secondary research. The authors, Andrew Benett, the CEO of Arnold Worldwide and Ann O’Reilly, the chief researcher at Euro RSCG, front contributions from a wide array of people in the Havas network. This book reads like Al Gore lecturing on a topic you agree with well supported with documentation – a bit obvious, a little pedantic, somewhat preachy but undeniable. 

After tracing the history and drivers of rampant global consumerism, the authors, reading the survey data, argue that fundamental attitudinal changes are affecting consumers worldwide and that the global recession has not prompted these changes, but instead reinforced and validated them. And while the book documents and articulates philosophies and cultural trends that have oscillated across the globe forever, the authors insist that dramatic, significant attitudinal change has occurred and that this fundamental mind shift will drive markets and brands into the future. 

“The shift away from hyper consumerism to which we have all grown accustomed promises to be big and lasting in its effects. The changes we are seeing will affect the entire global economy and virtually everyone who is part of it. This book seeks to demonstrate how each of these overlapping and mutually reinforcing trends is shaping how consumers make choices and has the potential to revolutionize their relationship with brands.” 

Brands that get it win; those who don’t die. Benett & O’Reilly offer four “paradigms” to describe consumer motivations and to prescribe tactics for effective consumer engagement in this radically different environment.  The four paradigms are the search for substance, the need to right size, the imperative to grow up and the pursuit of purposeful pleasure as key motivational drivers. Each is carefully dissected and documented. The new consumer is mindful and considered, wants to feel good about the brands they buy. Consumers want to buy brands that share and portray their values in on-going two-way conversations. 

Successful brands are green, develop communities and connectedness, and are transparent and inclusive.  Instead of “pushing consumers’ hot buttons masterfully cultivating the desire for more now … in the new culture of Mindful Consumption, consumers feel best when they make smart choices that offer real substance, are appropriately matched to their genuine needs and contribute to their sense of purpose.” 

PULL – Marketing Secrets the Fortune 100 Use

By Keith Chambers 

Keith Chambers started and runs The Chambers Group, a design studio in LA that morphed into a strategic consultancy cum agency.  This guy writes in a personal tone, as if your uncle took you aside at a family gathering eager to share what he’s learned in the business. Simultaneously self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, Keith gives you the sense that he’s been there, done that and has the scars and the cash to prove it. In fact he dissects his own book cover to illustrate the marketing and design principles he espouses. 

An unbridled capitalist, Keith starts with the basics. “ Free enterprise is a game … a mandatory game in that we must play just like fish must swim.”  The game turns on your ability to be perceived as unique and your ability to immediately communicate a remarkable selling proposition. According to Keith, there’s lots of headroom for new players since “I’d estimate that less than 3% of all products and services are powerfully communicated to their audiences.” 

This leads to the notion of “pull” which is rooted in the fact that humans process all new data through their experiential database. Everything new we encounter, we relate to or triangulate off what we already know. This is how we make sense of the world. Unfortunately for brands it’s a death trap. 

“We humans, as it turns out, are hard wired to pull anything that comes at us from the future back into the past and do it as fast as we can. You could say pull is how we make everything okay.” The trick is to use character elements; anything the target will have an affinity for, to build remarkable triggers that short-circuit this process and to get consumers excited and desirous of the new stuff. 

It’s a hard-to-grasp construct, which then is used to organize a ton of illustrated cases, studies, examples and war stories. Keith then spins the basic marketing tenets through this model illustrating how to use remarkability and character to drive awareness, preference and loyalty. It feels clunky as if the details were shoehorned into the theory. When he’s talking cases and practice, Keith delivers incredible value and insights based on real-life experience across a range of verticals and categories addressing virtually every marketing situation in anyone’s playbook. 

The Experience Effect

By Jim Joseph 

Like basic marketing and branding 101 courses, Jim tries to give the reader both the big picture and the bird’s eye viewpoint. He argues that “ at the crux of good marketing is the conscious and methodical process of determining exactly the kind of brand to offer consumers and exactly the kind of experience to create for them – and then developing it consistently across every facet of the marketing plan … The essence of good marketing is creating consistent brand experience with each specific consumer interaction.” 

For Jim, it’s all about upfront strategic thinking. If you think through the brand experience and zero-in on the wants and needs of your target consumers, you’re good to go. Since “how consumers feel about brands is completely shaped by the interactions they have with them”, all you have to do is execute the desired experience across all your channels and touch points. It’s about setting expectations and delivering on them. “The experience effect done well means that consumers can expand their interactions with the brand and have an understanding of what it will deliver.” 

Joseph, president of Lippe Taylor PR, lays out an array of marketing steps ranging from positioning and market research to building personas. He advocates painting a holistic picture of customers and urges marketers to strive for customer intimacy. He advocates mapping brand touch points to customer lifestyles and lifecycles observing that “the best touch points are the ones that can get incorporated into consumers’ lives at the time when it makes the most sense for the brand.” 

Celebrating Madonna and Tide as long-term effective brand stewards, he notes “ Both know exactly who they are as a brand, and both have had a consistent identity for decades. The brands have evolved through the years while still staying close to their equity. Both have had new competitors come and go, often at great risk to their brands, and both have shown great staying power.” 

The book is easy to read, not filled with too much jargon or too many buzzwords, covers the essential bases and invites comment and interaction at JimJosephExp.com. 

Facebook Marketing – Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign

By Justin R. Levy 

Justin Levy, Director of Business Development of New Marketing Labs and general manager of the Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, wrote a step-by-step how to manual and guide to using and advertising on Facebook. With a goal of taking a deep dive “into how Facebook can be leveraged by your company starting today,” he shares his insights, his techniques and his trial-and error experiments in a straightforward and fully illustrated way.  

For Levy, social media is a matter of necessity. “Understand the social networks, especially one such as Facebook, are the new way to communicate and market your brand. You can either choose to embrace it or watch your competition pass you by as they figure it out. For the non-believers, this book is your call to action.” 

Justin covers everything you need to know. From the origins of Facebook and Marc Zuckerberg, to the latest stats on usage, to the different communications options and page types to specific cases on creating pages, groups, campaigns and apps. Up to date, focused, comprehensive, this book is an operations manual for anyone vaguely interested or completely serious about using Facebook as a media channel. And you can argue or contact Justin here. 

Fast Track Networking – Turning Conversations Into Contacts

By Lucy Rosen 

Lucy Rosen, president of SmartMarketing Solutions, believes in networking as if it were a religion. After “25 years continuing to connect people whenever and wherever and however I can,” this book “is a compilation of everything I’ve learned by doing, listening, trying and experiencing.” 

Claiming that networking is like dating only better, Rosen says “good networkers share their contacts altruistically. They are not looking for or expecting anything in return, other than perhaps some heartfelt appreciation that someone went out of his or her way to do something helpful.” Then she lays out a process for defining and building your personal network along with techniques overcoming anxiety, power working a room, cheat sheets, gender-based networking styles and connecting the dots. 

But despite a cornucopia of tips, Lucy doesn’t address three things that bother me most. One, she doesn’t tell me how all this networking improves my life or my business. Two, the recession has seriously decayed the value of networking. Everyone was fired or broke and every networked their ass off. The problem was the networks were in no better shape than the individuals in them. As a result many people feel that networking has been played out. 

Third, she skips the downside of networking – the fact that you meet an array of oddballs, nudniks and needy people who follow you around like Mary’s little lamb and incessantly pester you. There’s very little guidance in this book for selecting, sorting or filtering the networking effort. 

The New Launch Plan – 152 Tips, Tactics and Trends from the Most Memorable New Products

By Joan Scheider & Julie Hall   

This book, written by the principals of Schneider Associates, a Boston-based marketing communications firm specializing in launch publicity, is rooted deeply in CPG and FMCG thinking. Much of it is applicable to other categories but the heart of the book is a deep understanding of the strategic thinking, component parts and careful sequencing of manufactured product launches. 

Assuming that its gets harder and harder to launch new products each day as manufacturer’s battle for mindshare and media share sufficient to get their products noticed, the authors propose a “new” launch plan mentality and template to beat the odds. Using data developed in the firm’s annual Most Memorable New Product Launch Surveys of 1000 consumers, part of the impetus for writing down these best practices is the goal of reversing a downward trend in launch successes. 

In 2009, 51 percent of respondents could not name a single new product. This result was a 64 percent up tick in lack-of-awareness from the previous year. Ninety-three percent could not name a single new product launch after being exposed to a list of fifty. This detailed and tactically focused volume is aimed at fixing this problem. 

For Joan and Julie launch is “the creation and implementation of a powerful multi-disciplinary process that successfully propels a new product in the marketplace and sustains it over time.” These guys are talking about launch and product lifecycle promotion and they lay out options, ideas and tactics galore in because “creating a launch plan requires discipline and a systematic approach to insure all bases and contingencies are covered.” This they do admirably in 243 densely packed pages. 

Tips are detailed, enumerated and illustrated with case studies, advice and imagery. Cases range across categories as the authors plumb the key lessons and articulate how-tos. But they are also realists who insist, “The bedrock of a successful launch is real innovation.” Similarly they argue “shorter is better when it comes to launch messages… Just stop and realize that nobody is listening past the first sentence.” 

Keenly aware that a launch plan can’t be too mechanical and has to be organically synchronous with brands, they note “ All launch choices should be based on your brand’s attributes, the dynamics of the marketplace, how your product fits within today’s retail environment, the benefits the new product brings to users and your target customer’s behaviors and preferences.” Beyond brand appropriateness Joan and Julie touch on every topic, from positioning, messages, advertising, social media, sampling, and measurement to keep marketers focused on the process and the prize but don’t take themselves too seriously closing with the admonition, “ Remember launch is both and art and science … Make sure your launch campaign is as fresh as the product you are introducing.”

4 Ways to Cope with Procurement

For the last dozen years or more clients have inserted sourcing or procurement specialists into the management of agency relationships.  Most agencies still haven’t gotten over it fearing that ignorant and malevolent bean counters will grind them down and steal their magic. 

It’s a classic mismatch. Personality types and business orientations clash repeatedly.For the most part agency types are C students on business and finance topics. They generally dislike or put off the process of counting, scoping, negotiating, pricing and reconciling. Similarly, agencies are notoriously behind the times in process automation and in using sophisticated software to manage their business. 

On the flip side sourcing professionals don’t know or care much about the intangibles of marketing. Sourcing pros create systems, which are inter-related and yield business results. Theirs is a world of ratios and regularly changing financial constructs. They look to use extensive process modeling and high powered software suites to standardize, template, count, sort, compare, benchmark and yank costs out of every system. 

The latest evidence comes from an ANA survey of 225 people – 76 client side procurement types, 59 client marketers and 90 agency executives published in Ad Age. Only 14% of agency executives think procurement knows anything about the tangibles of advertising and marketing and only about 1 in 3 feel that they communicate openly. 

The parties view the issues from opposite ends of the telescope. 84 percent of procurement people see advertising as an investment to be optimized. 74% of their agency counterparts believe they view marketing as a cost center to be minimized. The chasm doesn’t have to be as wide as it seems if both parties spend more time with each other and talk realistically together. 

Consider these four approaches to working more effectively to get fair value for the contribution agencies make toward client business results. 

Check your ego at the door. This isn’t personal. Procurement people are just as exasperated by the process as agency people. No one is trying to screw you. Both sides are trying to accomplish the same goal and meet profitability and productivity metrics. Its not necessarily a zero-sum game. It’s a constant negotiation where transparency and relationships directly affect the outcome. 

Understand the context. Business operations have changed dramatically over the last decade aided and abetted by the recession. Everyone wants more for less. Everyone is looking to cut every cost they can. Everyone wants to re-use, re-purpose and squeeze as much use and value out of every asset. This has been going on for 25 years in manufacturing, production, supply chain, research and development and human resources. This process is not an inquisition against marketers or agencies. 

Recognize the different points of departure. Procurement comes to the game with an industrial optimization mentality. They want to measure outcomes – what happens in the business. They don’t really care what it takes to achieve the result as long as the cost of getting the result has a reasonable ratio to the return. They are on a continuous hunt to define “good” in financial terms. 

They figure if they are going to buy something, it ought to have legs and they don’t want to buy the same thing over and over again. They ask a lot of detailed questions. They want to know why the same CD working on two different projects has two different costs. They want to know the ratio of Art Directors to designers on each job. They want to know why one e-mail project takes 4 weeks and a similar e-mail for another takes eight. They want to know the real costs and the mark-ups on outside vendors or tech suppliers. They want to understand why things can’t be templated, re-used or shot once in a universal format and placed in ten different media. 

Rarely are agencies models of process efficiency. There are few industry norms because agencies consider their processes; even the most convoluted ones, part of the secret sauce. Everyone does the same basic steps a different way or uses a different sequence. Every agency allocates staff differently. Every agency assumes a different number of rounds for review and revision and each agency offers a different mix of services priced in idiosyncratic ways. And while the 4As do annual financial surveys, everyone knows the data is not 100 percent accurate. This drives procurement people nuts. They live in a world of standards, norms and rules of thumb. And agencies do everything they can to avoid being pinned down. 

Why? 

Ad guys see themselves as creative artists. They don’t like to think of themselves creating molds or repeatable processes. Advertising is where business logic expressed through art interacts with customer interests and needs. Agencies create one-off executions. They prize their talent and want to be paid for the time, effort and creativity; the inputs that constitute a campaign. But like sports stars, the impact and productivity of the work is variable. Sometimes the effort yields a monster result. Other times it’s a strike out. This too makes procurement people nuts. 

Be realistic. In real life there are many predictable and repeatable tasks that agencies undertake for clients. Many agency relationships are predicated on the idea that an agency has arms and legs and capabilities to supplement the client’s marketing team. A lot of agency work is cranking out planned projects on time and on budget. And while agencies reject the factory analogy, there are many elements to agency work that are production-centric.  

Many agencies routinely re-use templates, creative concepts and HTML code to achieve economies of scale, to accelerate creative development or build-in production efficiencies. The sourcing people want to understand how, when and why this is done and they want a piece of this action in terms of productivity or timing benchmarks and predictable rates. 

Many big clients have created complex rate cards that account for the timing, complexity and business value of projects and align fees accordingly. Some have built-in incentives for efficient production and/or reward exceptional performance with bonus dollars. And while it often feels intrusive to agency leaders, having a fully transparent rate card often creates the case for custom pricing for special jobs that require extraordinary effort, talent, scope or timing. 

Working with sourcing and procurement is a fact of life. The world will never return to the old days. So use these four tactics to make the process easier, friendlier and more productive.

4 Social Media Mining Metrics

Social media potentially offers clues about customer mindsets, sensibilitities and brand affinity and awareness. The trick, in mining the flood of conversations, is to separate the abundant noise from the not-so-obvious signals and to analyze the yield in ways that offer marketers actionable intelligence to identify competitive strengths or vulnerabilities, shape messages, identify informal opinion leaders and influencers or suggest the best choice of media channels. 

In undertaking this labor-intensive effort you need two key things; tools and skillful analysts who can sift through the conversations, validate or invalidate the built-in assumptions that are baked into many of the tools and to find the insights that will be valuable for brands and their marketers. Mining social media cannot be fully automated. 

But the trolling can be. An array of free tools can get you started. My favorites for scanning the broad waterfront are Social Mention, Sency, YackTrack and Addictomatic. For peering into the blogosphere Technorati and Google Blogs are the most reliable tools with the deepest reach, though results are mostly a function of the key search terms and phrases used. Since each one is built using a different logic, savvy social surfers use several so they can get a broad sweep of the social graph, expose different facets of the social media universe and rely on each tool compensating for the shortcomings of the other. 

In assessing and using the intelligence gained, I am evolving four key metrics or dimensions to help clients understand and use whatever we turn up. 

VOLUME. Count the total number of conversations and the relative size of the conversations to calculate baseline awareness. By comparing this number relative to conversations about competitors or about the business vertical, you can understand the relative positioning of your brand. By analyzing the volume by audience segment or over time we can plot the impact of marketing campaigns, promotions, social media activity or news coverage. With a clear sense of awareness and positioning, all kinds of marketing strategy and tactics can be brought to bear. 

SENTIMENT.  Do they care and are they for you or against you. This vector seeks to understand receptivity to and perceptions of brands. Most of the free tools use baked-in business rules about word proximity and phraseology to determine sentiment. This is useful but not necessarily accurate since it depends on tables of words and phrases pre-determined to be positive or negative. 

As a result most tools return bell curve results with the hump in the middle labeled “neutral” which means that the data scanned doesn’t have a preponderance of good or bad words associated with your brand. And while its true that most consumers are ambivalent about most brands; it would be a mistake to accept a “neutral” rating on its face. Sifting thru conversations is required to separate “machine neutrality” from genuine neutrality.

INTENSITY. Borrowing technique from signals intelligence analysis, this dimension seeks to understand where the conversation originates, who responds and if there are changes at specific times or over defined time periods. Gathering this data can suggest seasonality; trigger-events or begin to identify opinion-leaders and market-makers. 

IOLs. Informal opinion leaders are bloggers, tweeters, videographers, uploaders, commentators, friends or frequent site visitors who direct, distract, side track, explain or enrich the online conversation. Understanding who they are, what opinions or perspectives they represent and gauging their reach, their relative circle of influence and the consistency of their POVs guides marketers in shaping media and PR outreach. IOLs are the poor man’s focus group to test new initiatives, float trial balloons or drive instant feedback. 

These four vectors shape the utility of social media mining and transform raw data into useful intelligence that can be nimbly applied to messaging, marketing and media. All four are evolving as the tool sets and the analysts using them become more familiar with the social universe and how it impacts brands and business categories. Over time, norms and best practices will emerge. But for the moment, these four pathways provide the best approaches to understand and utilize what customers are saying about us and our brands. 

 

Targeting Ads to Individual Brains

Advertising is about awareness and resonance leading to engagement, desire and purchase. Savvy ad guys are constantly trying to improve our ability to understand, target and get inside the heads of target customers to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the memes and means of communication. 

Traditionally the tools for calibrating images, messages concepts and media choices were multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative market research and media usage ratings filtered through creative gut instinct. Behavioral data and neuroscience are new tools for hedging our bets and for cueing creatives. But old habits are hard to break. 

New approaches and new research raise the prospect of identifying the ways we think, process, understand and choose content, which should inform how ads are made and where ads are placed. This is the Holy Grail that art directors, copywriters, strategic planners and user interface designers are perennially chasing. 

Underlying these approaches are an array of assumptions worth articulating: 

• Different people think and process in different ways
• Thinking styles are hard-wired from birth
• Much of our thinking process is subconscious
• How we think determines our behavioral choices
• There are identifiable brain processing styles
• We are overwhelmed with inputs and stimuli
• A lot of our thinking is dedicated to sorting and filtering
• The Internet has changed the way we read and process; maybe how we think
• If you know how we think, you can figure out better ways to communicate
• If you can tag people by how they think, you can persuade them better or faster

The obvious conclusion is to create a segmentation scheme that accurately reflects differences among target audiences then craft messages that appeal directly to each segment delivered according to stated or inferred customer preferences. 

Sounds like a piece of cake doesn’t it? 

There are countless personality survey instruments that type and segment people along some variation of the Myers-Briggs axes. They range from sophisticated tools to simple magazine-like quizzes. Each purports to help understand what kind of person you are and by understanding personality types and/or matching it with demographic data, marketers can infer likes, dislikes and media preferences. 

In the direct and database world marketers have become extremely sophisticated at using behavioral data and purchase history to model segments and predict likely behaviors. Yet having mastered serial regressions techniques these guys can tell you who is likely to buy with very good accuracy. But they don’t know why.    

How and why researchers slice and dice the audience seems to make all the difference. The battle to determine the best, the most accurate research methodology has been going on since the first ad was written. 

Among the classic arguments used to promote or to discredit various technical approaches are 

• The people who make the ads; aren’t the same as those who receive them
• The sample isn’t statistically significant, representative or project able
• The data doesn’t control for environmental or cultural factors
• The data only shows what they do; not why they do it
• The segments are fancifully named; but you can’t actually find these customers
• The segments align with sellers’ desires; not buyers’ needs 

Into this on-going debate comes Xyte Technologies, a start-up behavioral research firm in Madison, WI, led by Linda McIsaac, a psychologist. 

Xyte starts with a personality profile and layers on different data in seven steps to create a funnel-like filtration process that supposedly can predict who will like and respond to specific creative stimuli. In working with clients like CBS TV Networks and Pepsi they conduct additional product/service-centric surveys that probe for buying habits, leisure activities and media usage. 

The filtration process begins with a 16 cell segmentation scheme, called “Xying Insights” which promises in 28 questions to “identify different ways people absorb, process and delineate information” as well as “understand how the mind functions.”  The cells are pretty discrete. The biggest cell “Organize” is just 16% of the population and the smallest “Operate” is just 3%, five times smaller. These segments have been tested and validated by overlaying them on panels representative of the US population operated by Knowledge Networks and StartSampling 

These serious claims, tested in military, corrections, youth development and HR markets, seem to border on the efficacy of the Vulcan mind-meld. But don’t take my word for it. Take the personality test and make your own assessment.

Ping support@xyte.com for a personal password to the survey. 

Layered on top of the 16 behavioral profiles are four sets of “dichotomies” that separate consumers by how their minds work, where they get their energy from, what makes them comfortable and their dominant decision-making  time frame. Tacked on to these results are the intimatelycorrelated variables of income and education and some consideration for environment, genetics and personal experiences. 

Mind function is divided between “weavers” who weave data together and see interruptions as opportunities for intellectual riffs versus “drivers” who are precise step-by-step linear thinkers.  Energy is either passive and inward facing and protective or outward facing and aggressively proactive. Comfort is a function of either rational and logical thinking or people-oriented feelings as the dominant approach for assessing information. And decision-making focuses on whether you are a short-term in-the- moment thinker or a future-focused abstract thinker. 

When the four dichotomies are overlaid on the 16 personality types they yield four decision-making constructs. 

MIND. People who solve problems and think visually or in abstractions. They rely on instinct to make decisions and have a wry sense of humor. 

WORD. Stories, words and people matter most. Puns, plays on words, rhythms and cadences resonate with them. Most of the creative community falls in this bucket. 

BODY. These customers learn by touching and feeling. Tangibility and experience influences their choices. They like what they know and are resistant to change. 

HAND.  They hold it and know it. Short-term focused, hardly engaged these consumers are mavericks who don’t respond to emotional appeals. 

By addressing these constructs directly advertisers avoid talking to themselves and instead appeal to the way each segment perceives their reality. On the basis of this worldview, Xyte argues that since WORD people only represent 18.5% of the population, the copy, visuals and channels that turn them on don’t work for the other 81.5% of us. This disparity in job function explains why so many ads fall flat; we’re talking to ourselves not our target audiences. Moreover they argue the clients who approve creative work share the word propensity and therefore compound the error. 

The yield for creatives from this complex series of overlays and calculations is a formula to make ads resonate and stick better with their intended audiences. By using this matrix of data, writers, designers and producers can identify and map content, input sense, receptivity, wiord choice, visuals, comfort, humor, music and media channel to better engage, incite and motivate target audiences. The promise is that marketers can speak each individual’s “brain language.” 

It’s weird and big-brotherish that what we think of as personal, idiosyncratic and complex can be known and studied. Nobody likes feeling that exposed. The idea that our innate preferences and subconscious bio-mechanical systems can be explored and exploited by marketers is uncomfortably intrusive Yet maybe neuro-behavioral science can make us better at what we do. Even if this creeps you out, it’s worth looking at seriously.

Who Owns Social Media Monitoring?

The need to understand, monitor and mine social media has prompted a scramble for ownership, authority and control among marketers, ad agencies, digital specialists and PR guys. Like the blind men and the elephant each has a legitimate claim and each has a partial view. 

The promise of social media is insight, conversations and engagement. So naturally the players responsible for these marketing or communications functions will scramble to embrace, control and deploy the newest tools. Interestingly each functional team is also a consumer of the “take” eager to interpret, use and apply the learnings from social media monitoring for messaging, customer engagement, media pitching and improved usability. 

Theoretically, according to the Useful Social Media people, this should be a team sport organized and orchestrated by a CMO. “A company’s communications team has a key role to play in the internal development of social media engagement, by incorporating key components of social media within the organizational communication strategy.” But this text book thinking never happens in real life where each team competes for the prize and struggles for limited executive level attention and resources. 

Consider the contenders … 

Marketing Team. Charged with creating the brand and moving products , they are keenly interested in what’s being said about the company, the product sets and the competition. Looking for any competitive opening or advantage, they imagine that a silver bullet or a short term tactical idea might emerge from the haze of tweets, blog posts, comments, retweets and videos online. According to the Aberdeen Group, “the marketing organization was the earliest adopter of social media monitoring and analysis and continues to be the group that utilizes consumer insights gleaned from online conversations the most.” 

Agency of Record. Steward of the brand and Royal High Sheriff of the messaging realm, the agency of record commands the macro viewpoint on all communications and plays the role of integrator and adjudicator on all branding, positioning, personality and messaging topics. Agencies eager to maintain their posture not only assert their overview but are interested to see how social media anticipates, reacts and reviews their work. 

Digital Agencies. These are the guys who actually understand the dynamics of social media because they grasp the underlying technology and as digital natives instinctively mirror the psychology of consumers as well as their online behavior. Often seen as subservient to AOR partners, these agencies actually create the content and the digital assets, manage a lot of the labor-intense work of collecting, reading, weighting and assessing social media conversations. They generally own the software or tools needed to monitor the social sphere and believe that they have a lock on crafting engagement strategy and reading the tea leaves to draw out and operationalize tactical and strategic implications. 

PR Agencies. Reputation managers tasked with positioning and presenting the brand by serving as spokesmen and engaging the media, they have seen social media as a way to garner greater prestige with and among clients plus a greater share of the marketing spend. Since PR has traditionally focused on reputation management, earned media, third party validation and awareness building, it logically follows, they argue, that social media falls into their portfolio. With a macro focus on overall corporate and brand objectives and the track record of identifying and engaging opinion-leaders and media decision-makers, PR guys claim to have the right perspective to understand, interpret and apply the lessons gleaned from social media most effectively. Get their broader perspective here. 

The struggle to “own” social media monitoring is an opportunity to advance the cause of integrated marketing in disguise. Here are 5 potential moves. 

1. Marketing should assert leadership and assign roles, scope the labor-intensive workload and decide which is the most cost-effective resource to get the job done. 

2. Similarly marketing should determine which tools are used and how the raw intelligence is processed and by whom. 

3. This is an opportunity to force disparate agencies to work together to bring multi-perspectives and skill sets to bear in understanding what is really being said and in separating the considerable noise from the feint but potentially powerful signals being sent. 

4. Collectively the players should determine what gets measured and what methodology is used to measure social media. Frequency, intensity, thought leadership, weighting and influence are all loosely-defined terms in need of common definitions. Different software tools measure different things. A dedicated collective effort could determine which tools do what and which work best together. 

5. The collective should then determine what to do about social media insights and strategy by planning and coordinating campaigns, initiatives and content creation across channels. 

Social media is messy. It cuts across the standard boundaries within a brand’s eco-system. As a result it requires a different and cross-functional response, which might just add value to the overall marketing and communications effort. The key is intention and leadership from marketing management.