Where’s my social media?
By Hugh Jordan. What’s the state of social media communications? Agencies and brands talk a good game, but are they simply paying lip service, worried about being left behind by rivals?
“What most brands and agencies still don’t understand is, how do you engage with people?” says Gladys Elia, who runs her own social media and PR consultancy firm, gme pr. “They understand the technology. They get the concept of how to build a Facebook page, how to get a certain amount of followers, even buy followers, god forbid, but it is how to stimulate those followers and engage with them that they still don’t understand.”
Elia has worked in the field for over 20 years, initially as part of global agency WPP before branching out on her own. She has witnessed social media grow from being the tool of the techies to the brand platform every company must now be seen on.
So, who is doing it well?
“Nike, Apple too, but that is mainly because of their products,” says Elia. “The techie companies that used to do it well have fallen behind, I think because they don’t have the content. They have just stuck to what they knew and continued doing it.”
Another issue is that while social media is still seen by many companies as an external influencer, a way of connecting with and selling to consumers, the fact that it is a two-way channel necessitates internal restructuring.
In a post social media age, defining different departments’ roles becomes harder – where, for example, does the complaints department end and marketing begin? Crises timetables have been truncated drastically by the adoption of social media. To be truly responsive companies must accept, to a certain extent, a decentralisation of power within their organisations. Hierarchical chains of command become less important. Instead, trust must be put in individual employees to negate an issue before it even becomes one.
For this kind of fluidity, though, every person in the company needs to be engaged and in line with the brand’s identity. Those companies where employees are not will struggle.
“‘I want one. I want a social media’ – that is literally what people say,” Elia laughs. “But unless a company is aligned internally, with marketing, PR, web design and management, it won’t work… It has to be all the way up to the board and the CEO. That can be the hardest thing – to convince board members that social media is for them too. They are concerned how much time will it take up, what happens if investors see a blog post and don’t like it… There are risks involved.”
