Not influencer relations or analyst relations, but mainstream marketing communications should manage your firm’s social media. That’s the outcome of a small-scale poll we ran over the last half of 2009. Our unscientific survey aimed to gather some opinions, and the overall view is that social media need to be centralised rather than in a silo.
Centralisation is important because top-level co-ordination is needed to empower social media managers to really engage in conversations. As one respondent put it: PR is needed for content & dissemination, and marketing gives strategy & objective setting. Depending on where the heavy lifting is in your organisation, that means that either PR or marketing should be leading on social media.
And where should it not be? No-one said that analyst relations should manage social media, and very few – mostly men under 35 – said that it should be influencer relations.
What’s your opinion?