While pondering an entry for Where’s Adam’s iPod an article in the Financial Times caught my eye. I decided to take tangent with this entry focusing not on where Adam’s iPod (could have) gone, but on what I would’ve been thinking while there.
The article was inappropriately titled and not that important, the focus was on the corporate use of blogging and social media (the two being distinct from one another but blurred in the story). The story started in an engaging manner relating a recent incident involving Motrin. The short version of the Motrin case study goes like this; an advertisement for Motrin showed moms suffering pain from wearing baby-carriers, and of course advocated for the use of Motrin to relieve that pain. According to the article, this angered some people who took the ad to imply babies were a pain. Isn’t there a famous quote about nothing bringing people together like a common enemy? Famous quote or not, it worked in this case. Eventually someone in the marketing department of McNeil Consumer Healthcare e-mailed bloggers and the situation subsided; at least for the purposes of the financial times article.
Here’s where things get sketchy. The financial times article then made the leap that many editorials make, assert something as true then rally the rest of your story around it. The assertion in this article was that the Motrin situation “…illustrates the power of social media”. Presumably, they meant the power was something more than a force that could drive a marketing department to write an e-mail.
The article then got interesting again not for what it said but what it described. It described companies creating vast war rooms of bloggers and social media surfers. These folks need bosses, so companies were also described as creating high level positions with titles such as “…director of social media, head of communities and conversation, vice-president of experiential marketing, and digital communications manager”.
At this point, I’m going to make an assertion; there are probably three camps of people reading this:
- Camp 1, those who think its cool someone could get a job where they are paid to browse Facebook, MySpace, and blogs looking for bad press. Perhaps even becoming so good they eventually could get promoted to a job bossing other people around, telling them to browse Facebook.
- Camp 2, those who read the job titles in the previous paragraph then rolled their eyes and/or groaned.
- Camp 3, those who could not care less other than to wonder how people get away with this stuff.
To Camp 1, I say shouldn’t you be updating your Facebook status about now?
To Camp 2, I say nothing but we share a knowing glance that in 6 months the people with those titles will be out on the street and busy figuring out how to reword that phony title on their resume into something marketable.
To Camp 3, I say read on to find out how they can get away with this.
These made-up jobs exist at the intersection of media, marketing, and customer service. All three of those areas are important to modern business, and share a lack of industry standards. Put another way; everyone has to do it, and nobody has to do it the same way. Why? Maybe because many in large corporations when it comes to PR, marketing and customer service, each company believes their situation is unique and not bound by what the other person is doing. These areas also have in common a lack of measurability. There simply is no way to calculate the actual dollar value of good or bad publicity. However, everyone agrees that this publicity has some value and therefore it should not be ignored.
Ultimately, this train of thought leads to the idea that good publicity roughly equates to advertising and since advertising has a cost, free advertising though good publicity is a good deal. Therefore, this logic asks, what the harm would be in hiring someone to manage the publicity effort. As long as they are paid less than the equivalent expense in advertising dollars, it’d be fairly easy to persuade a marketing department to direct a group of people to manage this “free” advertising.
So the next time you are socializing in your social media of choice, rest assured that the person responding to your “friend” request at XYZ Corp. is probably sincere, informed, and willing to listen to your opinions. After all, they are being paid to support their social network.
