By Dan Greenfield
When it comes to integration, PR and marketing professionals seem a little conflicted.
Few would deny the value of integrating sales, customer service and community moderation teams when building a modern day engagement strategy. But most lack a clear sense of how to do it. Once more, it’s not often a top priority – even though many say it is.
Blame it on siloed thinking that still pervades corporate culture or the difficulty in measuring collaboration’s ROI, but marketing and PR tend to focus on building fan bases, implementing social networking applications and spawning viral campaigns.
And as social media gains acceptance, roles and responsibilities are less clear. Marketing and PR are not the only departments publicly engaging customers.
Ironically integration is even more critical in an age that values decentralized communication. Engaging an audience has simply become faster, more transparent, more personal, more public and more changeable. More than ever, colleagues need a better way to share and track cross-departmental functions.
Stressed for time with limited resources, PR and marketing professionals have a real opportunity to do more with less. By aligning internal teams, they can improve efficiency, avoid duplication, limit lost opportunities and clarify changing functions.
Most importantly they are better positioned to maximize efforts in reaching key influencers and audiences.
Integrated Strategic Engagement
I call the alignment of customer service, PR, marketing, sales and community moderation integrated strategic engagement. It is based on conversations with hundreds of PR and marketing professionals at PR+MKTG Camps (www.prmktgcamp.com) I have held around the country.
Through the power of integration, PR and marketing can better meet strategic business objectives by:
- Clarifying customer relationships (what is your relationship to your customer within your organization, is there overlap with other departments, how do you delineate personal and professional)
- Improving engagement practices (what is the message, who is the messenger, and what channels do you use to communicate)
- Establishing hand off processes (how is the proliferation of data and leads collected and information distributed internally)
- Streamlining follow up procedures (how is the customer served)
- Defining shared performance metrics (what constitutes success and how is it shared)
Roadmap for Integration Success
The road to integration is not easy. Or cheap.
Dozens of very large and very small companies are making significant investments in tools to manage the communications process. Forrester Research predicts that Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013.
And software http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/enterprise-20-companies-need-to-take-strategy-seriously/ according to a study by the Enterprise 2.0 Council is currently the biggest expenditure.
But before spending a dime on tools, PR and marketing need to establish a roadmap for success that focuses on bringing key parties to the table.
That roadmap may begin with what Ogilvy’s John Bell refers to as the Enterprise Social Media Center or Dachis Group’s describes as cross-functional teams. These efforts are a critical first step in establishing a collaborative framework needed to effectively engage customers.
But forming internal committees is only the beginning.
As Jacob Morgan, principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy points out, customers don’t care which department helps them; they just want their problems solved and their questions answered. And today’s customers have multiple channels to communicate with a company and plenty more ways to publicly communicate their displeasure.
Broaden Your Mandate
Subsequently PR and marketing need to broaden their mandate. Today, everyone is a potential influencer; therefore, PR and marketing must have a greater understanding of how the business operates to better address issues they encounter online that need immediate attention.
Routing customer complaints to right person, passing on sales leads and contributing to social CRM efforts are critical to brand development and relationship building.
They also must be prepared to help sales and customer service build their own media channels and instill in them the value of consistent messaging.
These new demands make the best case for integrated engagement. They may be the impetus to finally drive companies to align internal dynamics with the new realities of social media marketplace.
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Dan Greenfield (@PRMKTGCamp) is a media consultant and producer of PR+MKTG Camp - interactive one-day conferences focused on helping PR and marketing professionals better integrate their social media engagement strategies.
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