Marketing chiefs say in-house PRs should not handle social media
Interesting piece in PR Week today that says marketing directors do not rate the ability of their in-house PR people to manage social media. Ouch.
It says less than one in three think the PR department should oversee social media in their business, according to research. So who exactly do they think should be handling it? Get this: apparently some think it is the job of the IT department.
Seriously that is what the survey (by Wildfire PR) of 250 marketing directors and heads of marketing even found — one in five marketing chiefs believe the IT department should have control of a firm’s blogging and tweeting.
PR Week reports that “some PROs expressed shock at Wildfire’s findings”. I’m with them on that. Who seriously believes the IT department should run social media? Stand-up now. That’s nuts. Pure crazy talk. Social media is about communications.
To me (and no doubt many others) the findings simply underscore how far there is still to go in terms of understanding when it comes to social media. Clearly, social media is not IT, but because it involves technology and has tech elements that is where some would like to dump it. That’s a very reductive approach.
Rob Dyson, PR manager at children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, told PR Week: “Clearly a number of marketers believe social media are technical tools or an extension of the company website that IT should manage. But it is not just a bit of software and needs to be run by a part of an organisation that is personable.
“Twitter is not just about putting out ads, it is about building relationships. There needs to be a clear PR strategy behind it and someone in the business needs to have the inclination to use it for conversation regularly, or not use it at all.”
The study also found that just 27% thought the in-house PR team should manage company social media policy including Twitter and Facebook profiles.
Faith in external PR teams was even lower with a pathetic 2% per saying social media responsibility should like with an external PR agency. That at least makes sense. While external agencies can work on campaigns with your company on a day to day basis it is common sense that on going responsibility lies in-house — where ownership of social media must be taken.
A couple of other interesting stats here:
- 29% said they planned to invest more in social media during the next year
- Almost half polled have adopted social media in some way,
- Only 10% claimed they had only adopted it because their rivals had.
That last one is very telling. A me too strategy is a losing one. Social media is going to be right in some shape or form for all businesses, but the only reason to adopt it is a business one (that’s your business and not someone else’s business).
You can read the full report here
All Comments
Thanks for covering this Gordon. The stats were certainly surprising to us too. The argument about who ‘owns’ PR is actually bit of an unnecessary one if you ask me as there is no ‘one’ owner. The other stats relating to ROI and reasons for adoption strike me as more shocking. That businesses enter into a discipline like this with no clear idea why, is quite worrying. The full results are here http://ow.ly/3l7fx and I blogged about it here too: http://ow.ly/3l7g7
I agreee with their comments. Social media should be tied to SEO and this is because the social media requirement factor of SEO is as closely tied as any other such as meta,words etc. I actually tweet for my clients and setup social media free of charge as part of their on-going SEO strategy. It benefits them enormously!
A great post and I totally agree with you.
The job of the IT department are we back in the year 2000? They don’t understand how to communicate messages properly or how to build communities online. This survey is very questionable indeed – it’s almost laughable.
Well if one in 5 believes social media belongs to IT then 4 out of five doesn’t think so. Small comfort.
Crikey. The IT department? P45 for that marketing director, pronto. No excuses…
Interesting article which I am sure will strike up a strong debate. From my perspective, I see that Social Media should most definitely not be handled by an IT dept. As for who owns PR, if there is a PR dept, that seems to me to be self-evident. Where an experienced in-house Social Media Fuzzi is not available, its got to be a specialist agency for me every time, but only one with whom I can operate as a partnership, not an agency/client basis.
20% said IT should run their business’ social media accounts!
How the hell are they surviving in the position of marketing director? Clueless.
I use social media everyday. I cannot belive that anyone would leave it down to the IT Dept!
Recently I have been teaching other businesses how to use social media for their businesses. I teach them how to find people, what groups to target, which are the best tools for them etc but always believe that the end results should be carried out by the company in question. Why? Because no-one knows their business like they do. I always monitor them, and continue to make suggestions on how they may improve their use of social media. This long term approach works well for everyone who cannot afford a specialist consultant.
Interesting article. If 27% of directors thought in-house PR should handle social media, 20% though IT should handle it and 2% though an external PR agency should handle it. What was the conclusion of the remaining 51%. Where did specialist social media companies rank?
What the heck were they thinking? Social media is definitely communication. And you best to handle a company’s communications? Huh? PR Department, of course. Or marketing if the company does not have a PR department.
There are many aspects to social media and reasons for doing it. I can see why SEO people need to play a part, but they shouldn’t own the relationship with customers. Communication is essential to building relationships and not typically a skill of IT people. And if for some reason the people taking the survey were focused on measured results, well marketing people can certainly cover that as well. This reminds me of when the Web was first taking hold in corporations. IT was put in charge. Made no sense then; makes no sense now. So either the survey was flawed or the respondents don’t understand social media’s role in a business.
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