I've got questions.
Over the past year, dozens of tech companies in Silicon Valley like Cisco, McAfee, SAP and VMware hired me as a social media consultant. I got contracts with their product marketing or global marketing groups, not their public relations department.
My first question is, "Hey, I'm a PR man working at a PR firm. Why isn't this contract with the PR department?"
Many of my Silicon Valley marketing friends asked me a very similar question, "Should the responsibility for social media be handled by PR or product marketing?"
Friends at Google, HP, and Oracle asked me this question and until today, I always said, "social media should fall under PR."
Then, my friend, a bigshot in PR at HP, challenged me. He suggested that I look at marketing services as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.
I looked through a year's worth of social media service contracts and categorized activities as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.
Excluding monitoring and strategy development, more than 70 percent of social media services bought in 2009 were for customer marketing. My work on blogs, Twitter and Facebook was primarily designed to first attract and then communicate with customers.
"Aha," I thought.
Influencer marketing, getting people from the community to create unique content for us, was only a minor part of the services sold in 2009. The activities to make information go viral are still very much in development. Since Page One focuses on B2B social media, our 2009 clients were primarily interested in publishing their marketing information on sites they controlled. This meant that we got paid to manage Facebook Fan Pages, blogs, and Twitter and filled these channels with information that was directed at the customer.
However, there appears to be big changes in 2010. Already, our clients are asking for more activities that create interaction and target influencers for content creation. Recent contracts have balanced customer marketing and influencer marketing at roughly 50 percent for each type of activity.
Perhaps by the end of 2010, we'll see influencer marketing comprise the majority of social media activities. If this happens, I expect that I'll see more contracts with the PR departments of Silicon Valley companies.
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