Traditional business branding and out reach to clients in the past has been easy to place with key departments within a business. However, with the advent of social media and all the new avenues to business the water has become muddied and responsibly hard to distinguish.
As the whole concept of social media touches on many elements of a business, HR, Marketing, PR and technology to name just a few everyone has an involvement in developing this wave of communications.
Social media is a natural extension of both marketing and public relations. We all know that a well crafted social media strategy can have a profound impact on your business.
Social media has proven to be a solid marketing tool, so it isn’t surprising that many companies associate the two with one another.
Likewise, the wide and distributed nature of social media makes it a great platform for public relations or communications teams.
One area that social media has started to intersect with is customer service. We are starting to see clients and consumers drive the use of services such as twitter for status updates and simple support requests.
In reality the use of social media within your business is the remit of, wait for it – everyone!
If you want to win in social media you need to drive it into the heart of your business and make it a way of life. People by there very nature have a desire to share information and stories and there is far to much at stake to not sharing your social media strategy with the business.
Obviously you need to be careful in terms of mavericks that may not have the vested interest of the company at heart and will need to police it initially.
As social media becomes useful in more and more areas, we expect to see many companies and brands adopt this approach.