Teaching the Rank and File Social-Media Marketer

Apparently the future of customer relationships is empowering the rank-and-file to act as a conduit of the brand message within the online socialscape. This is suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece via Scott Monty. If that be the case, and we also agree that the job is less about ‘managing the message’ and more about interacting in the community on behalf of the company, then marketers better get into the education game quickly. We need to become fluent in online community and social media to the point of being able to teach it to the rest of our organizations.

Here’s a case in point. My wife wrote a scathing rant on her blog about an awful experience with our local Sears retailer. She followed up that missile with the typical phone runaround with varying levels of drones and retail managers until the issue was resolved. It is likely that this heated piece of prose will sit in net space for a long period of time, in all of it’s Google-optimized glory just waiting for other outlets to pick it up. Were the marketing team within the Sears hierarchy able to train every employee to use Google Alerts to find these gems, the response could be swift and genuine. We need to train our people to fight the company’s battles on the customers’ turf, out in the open. Those that do so, ultimately are going to win. There is a HUGE opportunity out there for new tools and new roles in teaching every employee to do social-media marketing. The content must shift from ‘What is Facebook, blogs, wikis, etc’ to ‘How to respond to a negative blog post about our company’.