>The thing about social media marketing is that it needs to be integrated within a company. It can’t be a little project I do with no relation to the brand itself. Lot of companies are doing that, especially the bigger brands who are used to an advertising company and a PR company etc. for their marketing. With social media often they come to a problem. Even when they outsource the entire dish by paying lot of money they don’t get their money’s worth. One of the main factors is because social media just involves a Lot of interacting AKA socializing where you need dedicated resources on the job!


Another aspect is customer service/CRM, which naturally comes into play when interacting with your customers! Currently lot of brands simply direct these queries to a set email id. So the forage into SM remains partial. If customer service is to be made part of SM which it should be and will be if the brand is on social media. (Lot of brands are doing ‘campaigns’ which is different from ‘brand that is socializing’ for eg: Save the Tigers campaign by Aircel.

Currently I am finding this aspect a little challenging because what I find is that if I go about handling customer service aspect even partially, then the creative aspect where I am engaging the community falls a little. So ideally I would like the brand to manage the customer service… but maybe cause my clients are mainly Indian startups they don’t have the human resource who can ‘log into facebook and do customer service’ … I don’t understand why but I have seen couple of companies facing this problem! The traditional customer service rep does not want to or is not comfortable with using social media…

Also this requirement for integration within a company of its social media efforts brings to fore the requirement for in-house social media marketeers! Ideally employees who can manage social media for couple of hours in their job or even a professional social media person who is hired in-house who would be main point of contact for the company hired to do the SM work.

 
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