The Role of Social Media in Marketing Communications

Ford recently hired a social media czar and a five-person social media team. This follows on the heels of like efforts by Intel, Dell and Pepsi. They are not alone, according to AdWeek's Brian Morrissey. "Social-media experts are in high demand as companies attempt to figure out how to adapt how they talk to customers and even among themselves," Morrissey writes.

Social media are moving beyond an interesting niche, evolving into a "catalyst for changing how companies operate." "The biggest challenge is moving away from thinking about it as marketing and PR," said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst. "It's about product development, it's about IT. It's got to cut across all functions of the company."

It's also about moving away from the top-down, "Stalin" approach to marketing, as marketer Scott Goodson calls it. Goodson calls authentic dialogues "cultural movements," which are "about curating culture and creating communities and platforms for people to circle their wagons around an idea that is relevant and important to them. A Cultural Movement is about being passionate, militant almost. It's about joining a movement that you care about."

To Goodson brands will suffer if they are not authentic: "Fakes and phonies will be found out. The consumer is now the truth junkie who never forgets, who puts two and two together."

The lesson here, even for those companies that have hired social media czars, is to be authentic and to allow organizations to evolve. Simply shoehorning social media experts into traditional marketing roles is not the answer. An ad is an ad even if it's on MySpace.