It’s been a generally-accepted maxim that at some point “social media marketing” will just blend into “marketing” and vanish as a distinct specialty. I don’t agree. In fact I believe that this will actually grow as an independent discipline for the foreseeable future. Let’s examine why.
For decades, marketing was pretty much marketing. The communications channels were distinct, defined and unchanging for decades. So you had newspapers, which have always been newspapers. Radio has always been radio. And TV morphed into many micro-segments when cable came along, but even that innovation hasn’t changed much in 30 years.
So if you were a marketing professional, you probably cut your teeth on these well-established channels in college classes and honed your professional skills across these reliable, predictable, stable platforms.
The social web is the latest marketing communication channel but with an important distinction. It isn’t going to mature any time soon. In fact the rate of change is escalating. So while it was possible for the limited resources in a corporate marketing department to master the traditional, established media channels, is it really going to be practical for a company to spend time constantly studying the evolutions and revolutions of the social web and its applicability to their marketplace?
Doesn’t it make sense to out-source this expertise? In the long-term wouldn’t it be more economically-efficient for an outside company to be immersed in the social churn and then provide recommendations to a number of different companies? Here are some parallels. These functions are commonly out-sourced corporate functions:
- IT project implementation
- Legal
- Financial auditing
- Software application development
What do they have in common? A high rate of either technological or regulatory change.
And it’s this rate of change that will keep social media marketing out of the core competencies of many companies, too. The new competency will be choosing the right out-sourced social media consulting expert and expertly applying their recommendations.
This thinking goes against historic marketing convention. Then again, the social web is against historic convention, isn’t it?
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[...] key point is the emerging specialized role for social media marketing. We’ve featured this idea before — the web is changing so fast that focus on this area will require specialized roles — [...]