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Social media is good for your career

by Robin Grant in News on 27 January 2009 at 14:33

Advertising Age reports on a study of 400 CMOs (that’s Marketing Directors in English):

Only 16% of respondents said their companies have any routine system in place for monitoring what people are saying about them or their brands online.

The survey comes, however, as big marketers are paying growing attention to monitoring and leveraging social media. Procter & Gamble has a Social Media Lab that’s about 18 months old, and Unilever last month hosted a word-of-mouth summit at its US headquarters dedicated largely to understanding how social media affect its brands.

Another big marketer, Johnson & Johnson, became acutely aware of the trouble social media can cause when complaints on the microblogging site Twitter led it to pull the plug on an ad campaign for Motrin in November.

One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said marketing should take the lead in overseeing the customer experience and satisfaction. And he said addressing deficiencies in tracking and analyzing consumer feedback and buzz may be the key way CMOs can stake a claim to leadership.

This accurately reflects reality as we experience it – we work into both Marketing and Corporate Communications Directors on different clients. Although the most effective engagements tend to be when we’re working with a combination of the Marketing, PR, Customer Service and Research departments, there’s clearly a land grab in progress. It’s those that commission us whose careers’ are seeming to benefit – and not just for the mercenary reasons the CMO council gives, but because they’re the ones doing the valuable learning as social media changes the face of business for ever…

tagged: Advertising Age, corporate communications, Johnson & Johnson, marketing, Motrin, Procter & Gamble, social media, Unilever

Marcel LeBrun

I have observed many of the same things. It is quite common to find that a brand's foray into listening & engagement has started at the grass roots level by a couple of passionate employees who believe in the importance of listening & connecting with customers online. People start to notice and say good things about the brand's engagement efforts which goes a long way to raising the prominence of these initial brand advocates (employees). These employees often migrate to exciting leadership roles as the company gets more intentional about social media listening & responding to customers, influencers, etc.