Many observers of the scene have noted a bit of a disconnect between the claims for the business effectiveness of social media made by its true believers, and the results that even bleeding-edge adopting companies are able to measure “on the ground.”
To an extent, this happens in the early stage of nearly every innovation; and it’s probably more noticeable and longer-lasting, the more radical the innovation …because the existing order of things isn’t set up to fully utilize its potential. Let’s face it: hierarchical, departmentalized business really just isn’t set up to be social. Writing in Advertising Age / DigitalNEXT, Chris Perry poses this question:
“But what if social media and its inherent benefits are so revolutionary, so potentially game-changing, that it takes time for people to figure out how to best use them? More fundamentally, what if organizational silos and constraints limit its potential to address a new brand-building equation?”
Chris relates a nifty example about… how the airplane did not realize its full war-changing potential until a new organization – the Air Force – was created to exploit its capabilities …removing it from control by the Army, which saw it mainly as support for faster incremental advances by its ground troops. In similar fashion, business today is structured so that only Marketing communicates with the market, and principally on the old “megaphone” model. So it has difficulty, for example, routing customer comments through social sites to customer service or R&D; or figuring out how to let more people in, let alone allowing outside people actually do some of the marketing for them.
There’s some evidence that companies are starting to re-engineer marketing operations, but there’s lots to be done to accelerate this trend. Says Chris: “It’s clear that brand leaders haven’t fully examined structural changes that need to be made. When they do social by design, I believe substantive, positive and accelerated changes will occur.”
And a very interesting comment to Chris’ post comes from “Denise” of San Diego:
“I would go one step further and say the full potential of social media/networks lies beyond marketing – these new capabilities can play as much of a role in operationalizing a brand as they do in marketing it … (using) it to drive the business and (developing) an organizational system for delivering brand value.”
