What is Social Media & Where Does it Fit?

As a follow up to Measure it!, I’ve been trying to answer the following questions: What is Social Media? Where Does It Fit? and How Do We Measure It?

The short answer on Social Media is it’s about people, it’s about conversations & interaction, and it’s about creating and sharing information over the Internet. The long answer and it’s application to business I’ve attempted to explore below.

What is Social Media?

Social media can loosely be defined as the democracy of content, with a shift in the role people play in the process of reading and disseminating information (creating and sharing content) – paraphrased slightly from Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

It’s easier to understand Social Media in the context of traditional broadcast media such as television, newspapers, radio and magazines which are one way, static broadcast technologies. For instance, the traditional role of the publisher is one of distributing expensive content to consumers, while advertisers pay for the privilege of inserting their ads into that content in an attempt to interrupt the consumer in the hope of arousing  an interest.

New Internet technologies have made it easy for anyone to create and more importantly to distribute their own content. This new era of Internet technology is better known as Web 2.0. Where the first generation (Web 1.0) of websites were static, the new generation is dynamic and interactive meaning that a blog post, tweet or YouTube video can be produced with a global reach . Advertisers don’t have to pay publishers or distributors huge sums of money to embed messages; now they can make their own interesting content and create a connection directly with consumers.

From a sociological point of view, the emergence of Social Media involves a user evolution from passive to active citizens. As opposed to traditional media, Social Media involves a shift in the way people discover, read, and share news: from broadcast to a many-to-many communication model.

Social media has become a medium that has a low barrier to entry and can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, which has opened doors for organisations to increase their brand awareness and facilitate conversations with the customer. Subsequently, Social Media serves as a relatively low-cost platform for businesses to implement marketing campaigns. Organisations can receive direct feedback from their customers and targeted markets.

So, Where Does Social Media Fit In?

Essentially, Social Media is a set of web based applications & tools which allow people to exchange content with others. This interaction between people online and the appearance of new influencers have implications for businesses. Conversations about companies, brands and products are taking place online and a type of written word-of-mouth  is generated from this communication. As a consequence, businesses are losing control over their channels of communication, and marketing and PR professionals have started to implement Social Media as part of their communications strategies.

The most obvious role for Social Media within a business is Marketing. As above this allows businesses to implement Social Media as part of an overall integrated marketing communication strategy. I believe there is a  wider role for Social Media, one which is not constrained to the traditional marketing campaign burst, but as longer term strategy which encompasses the relationship a business has with consumers. This aspect of Social Media is one that makes it incredibly difficult to determine where exactly it fits within a business and whose responsibility it is. As Social Media can have an impact on all aspects of a business, it may not be suitable to be the sole responsibility of the marketing department (or PR). This is one  of the reasons why we see more success stories with  smaller businesses as they are generally not layered with departments and internal politics like larger organisations. I’ve witnessed the tug-o-war between Marketing, PR, Product and Management and it’s not pretty.

Speaking from a marketing perspective, Social Media requires buy-in right from the top of the business as interacting with consumers through Social Media will expose many of the faults a business has. Most of these faults are already known but as a marketer it is difficult to resolve these which is why Social Media is fraught with many problems for businesses. So while the obvious role is within Marketing, the truth is that it requires backing from all aspects of the business – which requires change and great deal of honesty. Businesses generally don’t like change, and some can be really adverse to honesty.

Social Media can be see as different things to different businesses which is why it’s difficult to determine how to get the best from it. What works for a large fun consumer brand probably won’t work for a small conservative business brand. Getting that management buy-in means showing some proof that Social Media can have a positive impact on a business and is not just another fad. Right now- Measurement is the biggest obstacle Social Media has against it. In a traditional web based business, Social Media’s soft metrics don’t fit alongside many of the quantifiable and clearly analysed digital channels.

As Social Media is relatively new, the role of the marketer is changing to one which requires a more inclusive view of the overall business. Measuring the impact of Social Media means widening  the scope to effectively calculate the impact it has on a business. Unfortunately there are no easy answers here, while there are certainly a lot of tools that can monitor and calculate Social Media metrics, these are just tools and are essentially useless unless combined with an overall integrated business strategy which defines the role of Social Media and the measurement of its impact within a business.

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