A recurring debate was stirred up once again in the marketing world this week with a feature in PR Week on ‘Who Owns Social Media’and unsurprisingly many of the familiar players from across the three disciplines (PR, Advertising and Digital) weighed in with their views.

Features Editor Cathy Bussey’s well balanced piece attempts to bring to the surface tensions which have been bubbling away for the last few years between the creative communications sectors that have up until now had fairly clearly laid out stalls which defined their existence. The debate in PR Week puts the three would-be contenders into a boxing ring to see which one emerges the victor.

Whoever it is that surfaces from the final round still standing and with their bloody nose intact will undoubtedly believe that they rightfully deserve to wear the social media crown. The truth of the matter is that they will be wrong: there are no crowns to wear -only matching sets of badges to be worn by all.

Firstly, the idea of any agency owning a channel is laughable and dare I say a little bit arrogant. An agency’s role is not to ‘own’ but to support through expertise and consultancy. Chris Lake, Director of Innovation at Econsultancy echoes this very sentiment in a post he recently wrote on the Econsultancy blog:

“I firmly believe that a company’s social media strategy should be owned and managed by the company itself, rather than by external agencies.”

Those that submit to the notion that social media can readily be claimed in its totality as belonging to the domain of PR, advertising or the newly emerging digital sector clearly do not understand the scope, complexity or potential of social media channels.

Take the telephone, for example. It would be extremely bizarre to restrict its usage to just members the PR team, or have a ‘phone call strategy’ defined by an external marketing agency. It would be equally unlikely that a brand’s digital marketing agency would have the right to decide how the wider company uses email as a communications tool? Social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr… they’re all just tools (with varying degrees of sophistication) that serve to meet multiple needs.

Only when marketers start viewing social media platforms in this way, as facilitators which address multiple needs across numerous departments (comms, marketing, branding, customer services, corporate reputation, stakeholder management, research and development) will the ownership debate be replaced by a discussion that focuses around an integrated approach to social media.

At Onlinefire, whilst we’re often seen as a ‘social media agency’, we actually prefer to work collaboratively with clients and their agencies to allocate defined roles for social media activation. In truth, we’re much more than a social media agency; we’re a creative online communications agency with PR at our heart. Social media is our channel of choice but much of what we do for our clients draws upon multiple marketing touch-points from experiential to events to traditional news generation – regularly drawing upon the skills of the wider Eulogy! Group. It’s no accident that this blog has also ended up being posted on the Eulogy! site. It’s all about integration, don’t you know!?

• We don’t create flash iPad apps, but we work with digital agencies that do.
• We don’t do search engine pay-per-click campaigns, but we work with many great companies that can do these (and do them really well).
• Onlinefire isn’t a specialist in organising promoted tweets but we can get your brand trending on Twitter whilst a quality media buying specialist sorts out your specific Twitter ads.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a clear role for PR in social media. In fact, us PRs have traditionally been the gatekeepers of the brand conversation and as such are in a good place to see the potential opportunities that social media offers us. Admittedly the conversation has always been with identifiable mid-point influencers (media, stakeholders, analysts, etc.) but new online tools have allowed us to take this dialogue direct to consumers. Never before have communicators ever been able to have this level of proximity to our end users and this is a gift that the PR industry should embrace rather than shy away from.

Advertisers on the other hand have always been on the receiving end of huge budgets and as such have been able to create truly great pieces of branded content which inspire talkability. However even small advertising budgets on social media platforms can reap great rewards. Executed correctly, Facebook’s social ads can deliver amazing results for the right campaign due to its pinpoint targeting capabilities. This is probably still very much the domain of the media buying agency but the ease of which brands can manage these social ads makes it more difficult for some unscrupulous agencies to play the smoke and mirrors game with their clients. And Amen to that!

Agencies which have previously taken great pride in dining at the top-table with their clients have been forced to reassess their offering in light of direct to consumer alternatives that social media has provided the industry.

Self-defined digital agencies are currently the best equipped to advise and build social apps and widgets which add an extra layer of usability to social networks. This technical knowledge is something that most PR / social media agencies currently do not offer nor would they probably every want to.

So the content versus conversation divide still exists to some extent but for how long?

Huff and Puff…

Remember the story of the three pigs? They all set about making separate houses for themselves. Imagine that instead of each having sticks, straw and bricks respectively, one had just cement, another had a spade to dig the foundations with and the third pig had just bricks.

Individually, neither would be able to build anything resembling a solid structure but collectively, they each bring a different and vital quality needed in the construction of a robust home. Replace ‘pigs’ with marketing agencies (perhaps this doesn’t require too much of a stretch of the imagination) and substitute the act of building a house with the objective of contributing to a successful social media campaign – and that’s where we find ourselves today; everyone working in collaboration to build something that ultimately benefits all parties to serve a larger purpose.

360-degree Implementation

A few years ago when Eurostar were being held up as an example of a brand being overly myopic in its approach to social media comms, few agencies acknowledged the lessons that clearly needed to be learnt from the fall-out. Having appointed a social media specialist agency to carry out a (pretty well-executed) sales campaign on Twitter, Eurostar hadn’t factored in the other internal departments that may need to use the platform in the future. So, when poor weather conditions meant that many passengers were left stranded at Christmas without any information advising them on their options, many turned to Twitter only to be met with a wall of deafening silence.

I remember being invited on to Channel 4 news to comment on how the brand misread its customer’s social media requirements. At the time, I seem to remember a lot of focus being placed on the channel and none on the message itself. Sure, there were some cultural learnings for Eurostar to be gained but any criticism of their trial Twitter campaign merely deflected attention from the real problem which was Eurostar’s inability to communicate with its customers in a time of need.

In this situation, it was clear that the in-house team were not equipped to deal with social media as a 360-degree comms channel and that a specialist social media agency were reluctantly handed ‘ownership’ of Twitter in its entirety wheras in reality they were only allowed responsibility for a small campaign area. The danger of ownership being taken outside of the in-house team becomes apparent when the platform overlaps with other departments’ remits as happened in the case of Eurostar.

Therefore, media ownership (social or traditional) should always remain with the brand gate-keeper (i.e. the in-house marketing team) and not on the agency side. Only by having centralised ownership, can social media be divided accordingly between various internal business groups with weighting distributed in an appropriate fashion that reflects needs and not historical budgets.

Aim for the stars…

The situation reminds me somewhat of the Space and Moon Races which took place between the USA and the then Soviet Union in the mid to late twentieth century where two politically opposed forces fought a very global battle to attain technological and ideological superiority within space exploration. A key marker within this political era was fixed on which would be the first nation to set foot on the moon. After billions of dollars, numerous fatalities and a plethora of disasters on both sides the USA emerged as being the first nation to have representatives step foot on the moon.

The flag was placed, the video images beamed back to the world below and now, over fifty years on, as the Star Spangled Banner continues to fly in solitude on a windless moon are we able to say that the USA managed to claim ‘ownership’ of the moon? The answer is almost certainly no.