It’s a commonplace situation where a brand or business will want to get involved with social media, without really knowing why. Either their competitor is doing it so they think they should, or someone above them has told them to ‘do’ social media. They know what it is, but they’re not sure why they should be doing it. This is one of the most common problems people have when starting out in social media, because they haven’t really asked themselves what social media can do for them. This is the trick. You need to find out where social media can fit in your existing marketing and business strategy, so you can focus your efforts. And the nice answer is that it can fit pretty much everywhere!

Social media has evolved in a unique way in that it is now moving out of the social media ‘niche’ and instead the technologies available mean that it can effectively plug in to your existing business on practically every level, and not just marketing. I’ve put together the below diagram to show how this really works (thanks to Sarah for the design!) :

Looking at the diagram above hopefully shows just how integrated social media can be in your existing marketing activity, expecting it not to perform on it’s own (as I previously discussed) but instead looking at it being a  multi-purpose medium. It also shows the danger of not investing time or money into social media, as you can clearly see the potential it has to optimise your existing marketing of business efforts. The next question you need to ask yourself is :

How is your business structured?

As well as thinking about how social media can sit across different areas of your organisation and affect the everyday outputs of your business. Just as social media means that your different marketing efforts are now talking to each other and working together, it means that different departments in your organisation must now do this too. This is a huge potential for organisations, to really make the above diagram work in the way it can do. This is the exciting phase 2 of social media. You’ve embraced the individual technologies, now you can find out how they can really affect and improve your organisation. Is your business structured in such a way that you can allow social media to filter through different functions and departments?

The potential for social media to create new job roles is also vast. Cisco currently employ 7 people in their social media team, and they expect this to rise to 20 or 30 by 2011. We’ve also seen this across many other brands who now recruit a head of social media, or recruit for this role a la Pizza Hut. Whether or not social media is creating completely new roles, or instead creating hybrids, remains to be seen. Ultimately, social media has the potential to make the workplace more of a democracy, as your customer service team sit next to your web team, PR team etc etc.. Just as the diagram shows how social media fits your marketing or web channels, you can also argue that is the potential to sit across different departments in an organisation. Many are terming this the ’social (or hyper-social) organisation.

Hopefully what this post shows you is that social media operates at many levels and is no longer just something to throw in to show that you’re doing it, or following your competitors. It’s recognising how social media can improve what you’re already doing, through new channels that fit the older practices. It also emphasises the fact that social media can’t be expected to work on it’s own, but that it should function in a multi-channel marketing campaign.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Online Privacy In Social Media – It Doesn’t Exist
• Social media analytics – 2 new tools
• Would anyone notice if you left Twitter?
• Free Social Media Badges, Widgets And Icons For Your Blog Or Website
• Social Media Burnout – How Often Do We Need A Break?