As frequent readers of this blog will attest, I’m a big fan of extending social media responsibilities across organizations, not centralized within marketing departments. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that, at this very moment in time, that’s a rather tall order, considering we’re coming out of thousands of years of Command and Control economies. First, it was leaders of Tribesmen, then Kings, Queens, and Dictators, then CEOs of corporations. All this talk about open companies and decentralization of content is a significant jolt to well-established bureaucratic behaviors. And let’s not kid ourselves, it worked quite well for a very, very long time.
Change never happens quickly and, for just a moment, let’s consider this is a good thing. Sure, there will be enlightened organizations to make crazy-change happen, and we’ll all hear about them for some time to come at industry conferences. We salute them. But for the vast majority of business across all sectors, this change will come slowly, and in most cases, the more slowly and concentrated the effort, the more sustainable and embedded change will become. (Of course, now I’m realizing as I type this what a 10 cent word “change” has become. Bear with me.)
I would like to suggest that at this moment marketing organizations need to become the fulcrum of change by growing a gigantic set of ears. We all know what has created the need for organizations to become more accessible, more open, and more communicative: 1.8 Billion Internet users worldwide interconnected to each other, sharing content in a grand cacophony of dialogue. A strong argument can be made that organizations who are struggling to make sense of this should take a timeout to do less talking and more listening than ever before. It’s amazing to me to watch organizations scramble with near reckless abandon to add their drop to the ocean when there’s an ocean of conversation to tap into and learn from. Most organizations have no idea what’s being said about them, what the tone and tenor of the dialogue is, and how, when and by whom should the conversation continue. All of this data is readily available, mind you. It’s just that marketing departments themselves have never really trained themselves to listen very well. Looking at your email marketing stats to check your open-rates isn’t listening, in my opinion. Checking your Google AdWords dashboard for click-data isn’t either.
I don’t think any company is going to get anywhere with social media until marketing departments make significant strides in learning how to listen intently, interpret online conversations, mine data for cross-functional insights, and share internally how a brand is living and breathing in this interconnected world. In fact, it’s been my experience that marketing departments who learn how to listen are most immediately valuable to internal product development teams and service managers rather that sales organizations – their traditional brethren. This new role for marketing itself is a revolutionary migration of talent and skills.
Mastering listening — a combination of data, analytics, behavioral science, and raw intuitive powers — should become a central focus of marketing organizations right now. The better these organizations listen, the better they can interpret and share insights across internal departments, thereby making the perceived chaos of the Internet real, relevant, and palpable. Until that happens, I don’t believe we’ll see any major, long-term, or meaningful inroads towards the real change — and unparalleled opportunities — a social economy provides organizations of all types. Until marketing departments become one giant set of ears, lead by leaders who have embraced listening as a core professional attribute, flash-in-the-pan “viral campaigns” and other sugar-buzz programs high on talk and low on listen will continue. I just hope you won’t succumb to this. The opportunities of the social economy are too great to fall too far behind.