Those Damn Marketers…

Marketing as a profession is both idealized (think Mad Men) and despised in our society. Mitch Joel has a provocative post up on his Twist Image blog that laments a bit of the latter sentiment with a fantastically linkable headline “Kill All Marketers” (his blog in general is a must read).

Good marketers tell effective, believable, compelling, and *true* stories about their products and brands. They help shape the world around them through truly powerful stories blended with the underlying science that makes up the day to day execution of marketing tactics (social, direct, advertising, etc.). Seth Godin famously nailed this idea, and hinted at the downside of it, in his bestselling book “All Marketers Are Liars” – which he has tellingly renamed “All Marketers Tell Stories.”

Where marketers, and marketing as a profession earn our sometimes poor reputation, is when:

• The stories are false
• The means used to tell them are deceptive or abusive

As Seth notes, the marketer’s job is on one level to help people come to understand and believe a particular worldview through the use of storytelling. When the stories turn out to be false, and worldviews get shattered, people tend to – quite rightly – take that personally. Their offense at being lied to turns into anger and disgust at the ones who tried to make them believe. The marketers.

The same holds for the means used to tell the story, another place where the marketing profession gets tripped up. Bad actors out there who employ deceptive or abusive marketing tactics – everything from black hat web techniques to bait-and-switch discounts, false advertising to spam (in email, comments, tweets, and so on) – constantly remind people that those trying to tell them stories, trying to sell them on something, very often cannot be trusted.

Marketing, when done honestly, intelligently, and with directness and passion is an honorable profession that helps drive the engine of our of society in a positive direction. It’s why I’m proud to call myself a marketer.

Unfortunately, people tend to remember the failures and scandals, the stories born out as false, and the profession the bad actors claimed as their own. All of marketing gets tarred in the process, and the good guys like Mitch have to toil twice as hard as an evangelist for the profession to fight against that negative perception.

In any profession you’re going to have the charlatans and snake oil salesmen who sully the profession, but it’s the nature of what marketers do – try to tell grand stories on a vast stage – that makes the actions of those few loom so large.

Why no single type of agency will own social media

There’s been a debate raging among agency-types and industry watchers for some time now: Who will “own” social media? The ad agencies? The PR agencies? The marketing firms? Digital shops? Or maybe specialty agencies who do nothing but social?

One argument holds that agencies are converging as they chase the significant movement in attention and budgets towards digital and social, and it’s an epic battle for which flavor of agency will “own” social media in the future (Jason Keath’s post is a great example in favor of PR; to which Valeria Maltoni has a well argued counterpoint. The debate goes on). But here’s the thing.

They are all wrong

Why? Because all those arguments are based on a single false premise: there is no one “right way” to do social media to the exclusion of others. Social media is not solely about reputation, conversation, or crisis management. It’s not only useful for engagement, word-of-mouth, viral, or branding.

Rather, social media is a hydra, a multi-headed way of thinking, connected by a common set of tools, platforms, and concepts, that impacts an organization in so many ways that no single type of agency can claim exclusive domain over it all.

How many heads does this thing have?

• Social media is an excellent tool for long-term reputation building, for story telling, and for crisis communications – the natural purview of public relations agencies.
• Social media is incredibly useful at branding, creating emotional attachments and personal connections with brands of all varieties – the domain of branding and ad agencies.
• Social media, tracked and expressed via engagement tactics and metrics, can be the cornerstone of a powerful relationship marketing program – the haunt of marketing agencies.
• Social media can be very effective as a medium for promotional and demand generation campaigns of incredible variety – making it a valid tool for ad, marketing, and digital agencies.

The mishmash occurring right now, as outlined in Forrester’s “Great Race” concept, is happening in part because of client demand and shifting budgets. There’s undeniably a shift going on in where the client dollars are flowing, and no agency wants to be caught on the wrong side of it. In the rush there’s a confusion as the boundaries blur and client marketers learn. But the seeming convergence of agency practices in social media is also happening because those agencies all – rightly – see the practical value of social media in achieving results in their own respective domains.

The PR guys need social media capabilities as it’s good for PR, while the marketing people need it because it’s a useful engagement strategy.

Is there overlap? Of course, and there will likely be indefinitely. The entire concept of social media is so new and evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to tell where social media for PR stops and social media for advertising or marketing begins. Within most client organizations the same confusion reigns, and that’s simply reflected outwards in how they currently select agencies to work with in the space.

But my underlying point remains: In the long term no single type of agency will ever “win” social media all up because social media itself is a useful tool for every agency, and most every discipline. Rather, smart agencies of all stripes will develop expertise in social as it relates to their own practices and as client organizations of all variety come to recognize the value it offers.