Musings of a Marketing Maven

You know that fads have become main­stream when every­body is doing it. Or when it starts to be required as a part of people’s jobs. Or when every­body is talk­ing about it.

This week­end I encoun­tered two instances of the “main­stream­ing” of social media for B2B busi­ness purposes.

Thou Shalt Blog or Twitter

One of my friends told me over din­ner that she has to start blog­ging and/or tweet­ing. Her com­pany has begun to man­date that peo­ple in mar­ket­ing func­tions (like hers) demon­strate their pro­fi­ciency in dig­i­tal media and social media. We didn’t get into the details of the spe­cific require­ments but it became clear that hands-on expe­ri­ence will be expected of her.

She is not required to blog about or on behalf of her com­pany — that is, she doesn’t have to become a cor­po­rate shill. But she does have to set up a blog and keep it rea­son­ably cur­rent so she can talk about blog­ging based on per­sonal expe­ri­ence. She’s got a busy life, so she is hav­ing a hard time fig­ur­ing out how to carve out space and time to take on yet another com­mit­ment. Espe­cially one that she feels is being imposed upon her with­out any appar­ent com­pen­sa­tion or reward mechanism…

When we brain­stormed about themes or activ­i­ties she cares pas­sion­ately about, her inter­est in blog­ging grew dra­mat­i­cally. It’s unlikely that her employer will per­mit her to take time out of her work­day for blog­ging, so she’s going to have to love the sub­ject mat­ter in order to muster the enthu­si­asm to start and keep a blog going…

She works for a very large soft­ware com­pany on the West Coast.

I can’t help but won­der how fair it is for com­pa­nies to require employ­ees to blog if they don’t allow their employ­ees to do so on com­pany time…

Are You Listening?

My sec­ond exam­ple of social media main­stream­ing involves my brother, who works for a bio-tech com­pany in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals sec­tor. Although he doesn’t use the term “social media,” it’s clear that he wants to see social net­work­ing adopted by his employer.

My brother is enrolled in an online MBA pro­gram, the kind busy pro­fes­sion­als take to accel­er­ate their degree pro­gram and min­i­mize on-campus res­i­den­tial require­ments. His pro­gram is highly spe­cial­ized, focused on the spe­cific edu­ca­tional needs of peo­ple who want to pur­sue careers in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal marketing.

Last sum­mer he and fel­low stu­dents read and dis­cussed Groundswell for one of their mar­ket­ing courses. He is still talk­ing about the book.

He loved the health­care case stud­ies cited in Groundswell, and can eas­ily imag­ine how the prac­tice of lis­ten­ing to patients, doc­tors and health­care providers could trans­form the pharma indus­try. He’s frus­trated because there’s no obvi­ous per­son or func­tion within his com­pany to whom he can evan­ge­lize the ben­e­fits of online com­mu­ni­ties or an active lis­ten­ing strategy.

He thinks his company’s IT depart­ment should take on this chal­lenge, because he believes the role of mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als within pharma orga­ni­za­tions is very unlike their coun­ter­parts’ roles in other indus­tries. (I didn’t have an informed POV on that sub­ject, but ques­tioned the like­li­hood of IT peo­ple step­ping up to a mar­ket­ing function.)

He’s a sales­man in a field office, thou­sands of miles away from head­quar­ters, so he lacks the per­sonal rela­tion­ship with HQ execs to lobby for his ideas. It will be inter­est­ing to see if he can fig­ure out how to bring about change within his com­pany. Or influ­ence new prac­tices within his industry.

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