Social Media is Bigger Than Marketing

The following headline in the Harvard Business Review no doubt left social media marketers clutching their pearls: “Social Media Is Too Important to Be Left to the Marketing Department.”

Obviously marketing departments run a business’s social media channels. Who else would do it? Engineering? Accounting?

It’s a different story, of course, if you run a small business and don’t even have a marketing department. You won’t have any departments, and you’ll probably manage your social media channels yourself—if you even have any.

But if you manage the social media channels at a large business, odds are good that you could use a little assistance from people in other departments, even if you don’t realize it or don’t want to admit it. Because the vast majority of messages that customers send to business through social media channels go unanswered. The majority!

Imagine if your customer service team answered only 1 in 8 emails right away, waited more than 3 days to get back with an answer or just flat out failed to pick up the phone 88% of the time. Unacceptable, right? Despite significant gains in the perception and value of social media, many brands remain unmoved in the quest to institute a fully functioning social communication strategy.

Not every message needs to be answered, of course. A Facebook comment isn’t always the social media equivalent of a help-desk ticket. Nor is every comment a complaint that needs to be dealt with. Some customers just want to say they love your latest widget release. Still, almost half of customer messages do require some kind of response, so if the vast majority end up in the bit bucket, you’re doing it wrong.

Then again, markers aren’t in customer service. They’re marketers. They have a different skillset and a different job description. Handling customer complaints isn’t what they signed up for, and it’s not what anyone really expects them to do.

Rather than fobbing off social media to customer service, marketers would be well advised instead to bring customer service and sales representatives in. Make the effort collaborative.

Here’s Harvard’s advice for creating a cross-functional team:

1. Develop a social care team that can address all areas of social information efficiently and effectively. Identify policies and software systems needed for implementation.
2. Organize departmental responsibilities in the social care team. Clearly define roles and responsibilities among marketing, customer service, public relations, sales, corporate communication, human resources, etc.
3. Assign specific employees from each department to social media tasks. Set up social media accounts and give employees access to social media systems.
4. Create brand guidelines for standards, tone, and style of social media communication. Ask legal and human resources to provide a list of do’s and don’ts for real-time consumer engagement.
5. Define specific goals based on key performance indicators such as response time, sentiment analysis, engagement, views and shares, and other important metrics.

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that social media is too important to be left to the marketing department, but it is too important to be left to the marketing department alone.