There’s A Need For Integrated Social Media

Disclaimer: I started this post over a month ago and just never got to finish. Hopefully, it’s still halfway relevant.

If we’re being honest, I started on my path in marketing under the impression that I was going to be concepting billboards, television spots, magazine ads, working with emerging technology, etc. Partially because that’s what we’re taught in school, and partially because I was addicted to Mad Men (congratulations on the third Golden Globe). Nonetheless, it wasn’t so much that I was enamored with the idea of traditional advertising. It was that I strongly believed in integrated advertising. I still do.I now find myself in social media marketing. A fairly new discipline, many times separated from the rest of the action by clients. And unfortunately, the problem is two-fold.

Social is usually cutoff from the rest of the marketing mix and placed on a petri dish, insulated from the outside world. And like a child who’s sheltered their whole life by anxious parents, it doesn’t socially develop properly (no pun intended). Social won’t ever learn to properly integrate with marketing plans unless it’s included from the jump. That’s not to say it can’t work any other way. Social’s been shoehorned into plans many times before, but how often has it felt like it was an afterthought? Or even worse, a social program shares no common messaging with the overall integrated campaign.

That’s only one part of the problem. The bigger issue is that social isn’t easy enough for brands and large agencies to adopt. They like the idea of social, and they’ll dabble in it; kick a program or two off. But the fact that social itself isn’t integrated is reason enough to understand why brands aren’t emphatically jumping at the opportunity to include a deep social program in their campaigns.

As you might have read in my About Me page, I work(ed) for crayon. That is until Powered came along. Powered used to consider themselves a technology company. They had clients and they did social media workshops and the like, but their claim to fame was their white label community platform. They purchased crayon, Drillteam Marketing, and StepChange Group to become the “first full-service social media agency of scale.”

We’re going through our growing pains right now, and working on integrating our various services to create a lean, streamlined organization. But in theory, this kind of organization is what social media marketing needs. After hearing our CEO, Ken Nicolson, tell the vision of the organization, I began to realize how worthy of a cause this was.

Currently, the main way clients handle full-scaled social programs is by hiring 2, 3, or 4 different shops to get the job done. This creates the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen”, and it becomes a clusterfuck of a situation. I don’t blame companies for being apprehensive in getting involved in such a fiasco. After all, they’ve never had to go to so many different people to get a campaign done before. Why should they now have to interact with four different companies, who do four different things, to get one job done. Sure, they could go to a large agency who could subcontract the work out to four different shops on your behalf, but then you’re paying for added overhead.

The point is, the need for an integrated approach to social media was long overdue and desperately needed. We need fewer individuals talking about how smart they are in the space, and more individuals banding together to serve our clients better.