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YOUR STAFF ARE YOUR BEST ADVOCATES
Much of marketing in the past has been about maintaining a brand image and paying professional marketeers and PR professionals to do this for us. Social media offers the possibility of finding our own voices and having real conversations with real customers.
Much of the public use of social media by corporations up until now has been by marketing. In fact the phrase has come to mean a subset of what is possible with the social web and has to some extent become devalued as a result. I have deliberately avoided that bias in this book partly in an attempt to address the imbalance but also because I believe that helping organizations, or those who work for them, to find their own voice, or voices, is the best way to connect to their customers.
I believe that marketing and PR are professions at real risk of disintermediation by the web. We will need people to do our marketing for us less and less as we use the tools in everyday work and start to have more effective conversations between ourselves and our customers. Likewise PR. As the stories in the news move gradually online and become more distributed in nature, the idea of paying someone else to manage your story for you will become progressively alien. This doesn’t mean that we won’t need help – but the nature of the help we need will change. Rather than wanting someone to do our storytelling and marketing for us, we will want them to help us tell our own stories better.
I have been around ...
