Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive contributed article by Julian Hollingshead, VP of strategy at Ayzenberg, publisher of [a]list daily.
By Julian Hollingshead
Julian HollingsheadTo succeed in marketing amidst the new landscape of social media, tomorrow’s managers will need to become more comfortable delegating work and trusting partners.
To illustrate, imagine you are a brand manager who is completely opposed to trusting outsiders with your brand. So when asked by your boss to manage a seasonal TV campaign, you go solo. Brimming with ideas and self-confidence, you build the campaign positioning and author an ad concept. You write a dozen scripts, sketch storyboards, and search for the optimal location to shoot. You hire a cast, coach acting performances, set up lighting, get behind the camera, run a shoot, and then park in an edit bay for weeks on end. On the days away from production, you’ve planned meetings with the major networks, analyzed Nielsen metrics, negotiated network rates, and put together a comprehensive flight. To make sure the spot is as perfect as it can be, you take it to focus groups in 10 markets across the globe, traveling from session to session as you moderate groups and collect reams of insights. Based on honed research conclusions, you invest another three weeks to refine the spot and push five percent higher purchase intent. Congratulations, you really know your broadcast channel — you’ve been a one-person show for 15 months, and the seasonal campaign is looking great! Too bad it’s airing in the following year’s season.
This scenario is unrealistic, no doubt, but it helps to construct a metaphor between an established, proven marketing channel like broadcast and a new and often misunderstood channel, social media. Truth be told, the amount of work that should be put into the management of a brand’s social channel is no less formidable, and no less important than that put into broadcast or any other channel. A comparable scale of strategizing, collaboration, and delegation should be anticipated, and depending on your organization some of this may need to be externally-sourced. With collaboration and delegation, of course, comes the need for trust.
Trusting an agency to make a TV spot is one thing — a reshoot / re-flight option is there for the worst-case scenario. Social is another thing; when you’re talking about delegating a real-time conversation between your brand and the whole world, it’s understandable that marketers get a little uneasy. This presents a difficult decision for brand managers, because without the bandwidth for their brands to listen, respond, and participate in conversations that can’t be pre-orchestrated, they are still wallowing in the old school push-out-an-asset marketing paradigm. Whether internal or externally managed, a social media campaign needs a level of defined freedom to perform at the speed of conversation.
Does the need for freedom overshadow the value of a comprehensive social media plan with scheduled beats, pre-made content, scripted engagements, and approved language? Certainly not. Coupled with the agility to perform on the fly, there’s no question that, like TV, a robust strategy for social media content and conversations should be planned.
There are great examples out there that reflect a successful marriage of smart planning and agility. In the videogame industry, EA has built a portfolio of brand pages that use content and conversation to bridge the span between game releases, engaging not only with fans on the version of the game they’re already playing with responsive conversation, but also introducing upcoming versions in a way that has structure yet makes fans feel vested in the development process.
Another great example is Marmite, the 100+ year old British brand. At its core, it’s a very old and un-exciting condiment of yeast extract, but on Facebook it’s a youthful and fun brand with a healthy fan base, clever content and a lot of conversation. Yes, they’ve got people buzzing about yeast.
On the sweet side, the Oreo Cookie brand has nearly 90,000 people talking on Facebook, and twice that many followers on Twitter, thanks to a thoughtful mix of pre-planned visuals and real-time relevance. This “prepared responsiveness” won the day during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout, with no media dollars spent and a single tweet that turned into perhaps the biggest splash of this 100-year-old brand’s lifetime.
Obviously, one would never relinquish control of their brand, nor should they. A good social media team, whether it be at an agency, an internal team or some combination of both, will incorporate supervision in controlling the quality of outbound communication. For a brand manager to try to do it all themself, or to rely wholly on a community manager’s bandwidth, is to ignore the absurdness of the brand manager portrayed in the opening story. Good agencies have the benefit of being focused on social media across various brands and products, staying on the cutting edge of techniques with the ability to scale up and down to a brand’s every need. Internal social media teams may lack these strengths, but may be more steeped in the brand and its other campaign initiatives that are managed in a nearby cubicle. Eve Mayer, the well-respected author of “The Social Media Business Equation,” says it quite simply, “The companies that have the most effective social media communications are those that have a combination of internal and external people doing social media.”
It boils down to the ability to find and utilize trusted delegation. For many marketers there’s a level of delegation needed today that they have never before allowed, and a level of trust they’ve never before built.
