I spoke about Social-First Content at the April 2017 Social Media Strategies Summit in Chicago. As always, I left this Social Media Strategies Summit with valuable insights on social content strategy plus great ideas for further developing our brand.
From this Social Media Strategies Summit, I took away a specific insight on the challenge for social media strategists.
With traditional marketing communication, there were numerous clear divisions among important roles:
- Creative vs. analytical
- Writing vs. visual communication
- Strategy vs. design
- Developing content vs. publishing content
- Spokesperson vs. reporter
- In front of the camera talent vs. behind the camera support
- Media creation vs. media buying
- Offline execution vs. online / technology execution
- Mining customer and business insights vs. audience targeting
Looking back on the combined internal and external team we assembled to market our Fortune 500 B2B brand, we rarely had one person doing both sides of any of the pairs of talents and responsibilities above. Depending on a project's size, in fact, there may be ten or more people involved across these roles.
Social Media Strategists Face Complex Roles
Now, consider today’s social communications landscape. The divisions between the complementary roles have largely disappeared. Today’s social media strategists must be functional, if not fully adept, at nearly all these roles to succeed.
This idea started developing for me as we started using Hubspot for inbound marketing. I'm continually moving between intense analytical and creative roles in developing and executing content-based workflows.
The realization really hit me while attending a Facebook list building, advertising, and re-marketing workshop at the Social Media Strategies Summit. The presenters covered audience targeting and Facebook advertising in detail. We don’t use Facebook advertising very aggressively, so the topic isn’t one that has occupied much of my attention. As workshop presenters continued, I recalled that in the corporate world, I told media buyers that I'd ask questions, but I understood they had a knowledge base that was difficult to have without living in their world. I depended on their expertise to guide and lead us toward accomplishing our marketing objectives.
Today, however, you can't afford to make that distinction. Outstanding social media strategists must understand Facebook targeting, advertising, and remarketing. It’s just as important as understanding the fundamentals of writing a compelling story. They also must understand everything else on the list of communication roles.
Sure, in a smaller organization, I’m now taking on many more communication roles than as a VP in a Fortune 500 organization. A team of ten no longer exists for me. Talking with other attendees at the Social Media Strategies Summit, though, it's clear a team of ten doesn't exist for many of them either - even within large organizations.
Why Many Mid-Career Marketers Are Dinosaurs
Put all this together, and I think it explains why I see so many mid-career marketers are dinosaurs, either limiting themselves in comfortable, but career-threatening ways (“I just do PR” or “I write but don't do SEO”), or floundering while they rework the calculations on how much longer until they have enough money to retire.
The much smaller group is leveraging career experience and diving into social content strategy with a passion. These folks are learning to become perhaps the best-positioned marketers: they heave experience AND social sensibilities.
Seeing this landscape for mid-career marketers is why I encourage them to attend as many social content marketing events and conferences as possible. It's the foreseeable future. If they want to be a part of that future AND get paid, they must be aggressive and prepare to work with multiple generations that grew up in a marketing world where role divisions that made sense ten years ago no longer apply. – Mike Brown
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