Holy Trinity of Social Media Making - Actors vs. Concepts

Yesterday I went to check how the N2 social media hub is heating up after summer. Here few reflections of the hour and a half session of SoMe buzzing.

The hub started as always: you get there and find yourself in a middle of big room with only 10 anxious people in it. Then, sharply 2 minutes to five people rush to the event and soon it's too hot and heavy to breath. As one the fellows noted, people are in "the meeting manuscript mode" such like you get to the meeting, you attend the meeting and then you leave the meeting minding your other business. Yep, feel guilty!

Anyhow once again, the repertoire was entertaining and nicely bundled around one theme to which different actors bring insights. Yesterday, the focus was on what are the contributions of the holy trinity - media, advertising and digital agencies- to good SoMe marketing. 

From the very start the audience got best laughs of the simplifications over where digital advertising is at the moment: "Like us and win ..." is the easy option over challenging the customers' imagination. This is to say, firms are still buying customers rather than building a relationship which arises the dull question of what are the prospects of good marketing performance (awareness, differentiation, loyalty, phenomenal media coverage) when 50 other firms are using "the win the iPad 2" ?

Self-critical discussion also took off around the frames (budget and planning) within which SoMe monitoring and customer listening can actually succeed to impact marketing outcomes. In this sense, what are the possibilities to create ADHOC campaigns when treasury holder doesn't allow it as it's not planned?  Reactions, such like gin in a tin first aid transportation from Helsinki to Brighton as captured in Lonkero for People campaign from Hartwall last month, are not going happen too often as somebody rationalized. 

This is how the 2 week's first aid campaign started. What I would have wanted to see in the campaign pages was hooray for media coverage across countries - did it get any?

Continuing with the budget aspect further, heading off with this kind of reactive campaign is risky - what if it doesn't succeed? In this sense, budget must be flexible between both ends which holds that 'kill your darlings' is rather quick decision to avoid any further expenses. 

All of this (delivering triggering marketing content & social mechanics) finally comes to listening and understanding the customer. Today companies, projects and jobs are atomized to complex networks - often times the knowledge disappears in the chain. The company is orchestrating different agencies to deliver successful (SoMe) marketing for multiple brands: media buying, advertising design and finally those who actually build them together as the deliverable outocome. Agencies, on the other hand, are balancing between the threat of hyperspecialization and collaboration with competitors while dreaming of becoming a full house solutions partner. Orchestrating then again implies that the firm must hold the helicopter view of how different projects tune in the marketing strategy. 

Unfortunately, from industrial echoes organizations are still functioning through silos. In his sense, one might ask who is responsible for social media monitoring and how? If lucky, it's designated to one person or diced to one unit within a silo or even across silos. Not so good options could be that it's outsourced or it doesn't exist at all. Whatever the chosen option, the questions are: Do the people have listening skills? How the  information is moving across silos and different projects?

Often times the holy trinity of social media are though over channels where to be (Facebook/Twitter/Blogs) or what different concepts are involved in social media (technology/content/customers). For the firm though, it seems to be the mastering the different partners and actors involved doing it.

As for attending these small scale hubs and breakfast sessions, I highly recommend them as above all the presentations initiate good remarks and discussions in situ that are not present in the slides provided afterwords. Finnish networking then again... we can only for so long take lame excuses that it's a week day.