How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity
I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"
By now, marketers know the best response to have ready to these questions, which is: "We go where our customers are and our social media channel strategy is no different, etc." This is the right answer, but it is not one that should leave a CMO, or their executive peers, feeling comfortable. Why isn't the best marketing response good enough? Because the speed of change in this market means that even a social marketing strategy that makes sense in the one quarter may be completely undermined by the end of the next quarter (for example, if last December you'd written off Facebook because 35+ year old users weren't prevalent there, by March you'd have had to rethink your strategy as that user base more than doubled in 60 days). And it's not just demographics that are shifting, in very short order, advertising has quickly begun to move to more efficient online channels at the same time that online advertising has itself become a search game where the best keyword bean counters win. Email, a long time B2B and B2C marketing staple, is proving less effective as open rates descend and email usage loses out to social networks. Though social networks are beginning to absorb a lot of web traffic, the social networks themselves turn out to be a poor advertising medium because people prefer to interact with each other (instead of ads) in these time-hog social venues. As a result, traditional online advertising formats aren't very effective on social networks and people aren't making purchase decisions there either.
In short, and despite interesting new experiments like Dell's SWARM, it's getting really - really - hard to reach your customers through both traditional and new media channels, and even when you do find the right marketing mix for your audience, it's highly likely that channel effectiveness will shift again before you build your next marketing budget.
Of course you have a job to do, so marketing through this crazy wave is what you'll do, making tactical adjustments to try to maintain and grow your customer and prospect base. But your executive peers need more from a CMO than tactical adjustments in the midst of this uncertain time; they need leadership. Leadership starts with the recognition that social media is - in fact - destabilizing traditional customer-business relationships because it is - in fact - more compelling than traditional marketing channels. Mastering this enticing engagement medium, however, will require more than just out-of-the-box marketing thinking; it will require marketing leaders to step up to broader business leadership challenges, helping their executive peers reshape their businesses around new relationship models with all their key stakeholder audiences, including customers, partners and employees.
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Part II in the series will delve into the underlying trends, the forces at work beneath the tactical social media movement. To read ahead, visit my web site or download the full article.
