The Marketer’s Social Media Identity Crisis
You know what I mean, right? You’re a marketer, you think it will be great to join Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) and market your employer and their products or services and then a funny little thing happens…
You start to see what others do, how they are “themselves” on Twitter and not “Bob_XYZ Company” with a company logo as their avatar. They talk about marketing, communications, social media and trends. They talk about their dogs, the beer they like and what they did that weekend (okay, that’s me…the beer gave it away, I bet.).
You start thinking “who am I?” “what should I say?” “I like beer too!!” “I have lots of marketing experience and opinions, thoughts, ideas…”
Then it dawns on you, you know more about marketing than you do about the product/service you’re supposed to be tweeting about for your company. And then you realize you finally have a voice and that voice wants to also have a blog…but then you put that little phrase on your blog:
“This blog represents my views only and not the views of my employer, past employers, future employers….”
Wait, hold the phone. What?
So, you are a great marketer, with lots of ideas, thoughts, opinions and you want to share them with the world…but you turn them off when you walk through the front door of your employer?
Why does this happen? Stop the madness.
Why do a lot of marketers go into social media with a “push mentality” only to come out with a community mindset? That’s the power of social media! Yep, it’s true. And it’s transformative…if you let it happen.
Social media helps you, as a marketer, unmask the brand you are working for and it helps you to find a voice and provides a home for all of your passion, thoughts, opinions and insights (that, er, you might not get on the job).
So stop the madness, be the revolutionary. Have a voice. Take the time to engage. Maybe one day others in your company will catch up to you.
I don’t know about you…but I survived the Marketer’s Social Media Identity Crisis and am the better for it. What’s your tale to tell?
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Tags: Marketing, Social Media
16 Responses to “The Marketer’s Social Media Identity Crisis”
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Nice post Beth. At the end of the day, what you say personally and how that impacts your business/company are one and the same. No disclaimer line is going to change that.
Instead of trying to bifurcate our personalities, we should just accept the fact that putting a human face on companies is a GOOD thing, not a bad one, warts and all.
Jason Baer’s last blog post..Linkedin – 22 Ways to Dominate
Amen, sister!
Hi Beth,
I touched on this a little bit today when I answered a question about marketing in LinkedIn’s Q&A section. I also posted my post on my blog at http://specialdee.wordpress.com.
Recently I answered the question
How does marketing help an organization in achieving its goals?
on LinkedIn.com:
Marketing is a conversation between a brand and potential customers. The brand must do mostly listening.
The conversation must not be a sales pitch. The brand must converse in a genuine voice.
In other words, the brand is a person whose presence in social media and print and online publications offers a resource for questions about the brand that come up in conversation.
The brand’s presence is not meant to be a sales pitch.
Marketing is not a sales pitch.
Businesses should have their employees on social media sites marketing their brand, simply with their presence.
Thanks for your view.
Great post.
The next question that comes is how your employer then leverages your activity and the one from your co-workers for crow sourcing ideas, building focus group from influential people in communities, getting an idea on the perception/sentiment of his brand and products.
Best
dominique’s last blog post..Fighting Social Media Fear
Beth – great post. The challenge is that marketers who work for companies may not think they have the “permission” to be the social media revolutionary and have a voice. But when they leave the day job, they can do and say what they truly believe is correct, disassociating themselves from the company they work for. What a shame! They play the role they think they are supposed to be playing when they walk through the door of their employer, not challenging the system and trying to educate and change the behaviors of the organization. Ultimately, both the employer and the marketer lose.
Debra Murphy’s last blog post..Habits of Successful Bloggers
I don’t consider myself a marketer but I do relate to your post. Having a presence that is my own and also “managing” a presence that represents the clients/companies I work for… well the lines get blurred and I begin to second guess what I’m supposed to by saying and doing.
I’m just now entering this phase and I find it incredibly uncomfortable. But I do know that I don’t want my voice or the voice of those I work for become something that is representative of a prepared speech or rehearsed presentation. I want it to come from me.
You say you were able to survive the Marketer’s Social Media Identity crises – I’d be very interested in reading a follow up post on how this was done.
DaveMurr’s last blog post..Social Media Questions for Generation Y
Beth-
You inspired me to make a change. I hadn’t really thought about it, and just followed what some others were doing when I first started my blog. After reading your post I realized how ridiculous a disclaimer is. No one probably reads it anyway, nor does it matter. People know who you work for, and whatever you say is an extension of that company, disclaimer or not.
Mark Juleen’s last blog post..Walkin’ the Line
Beth,
Interesting post. I’m afraid it comes down to a legal liability issue. I’ve been told by friends who have blogs that their employers asked them to do this so if someone sued over the blog post, the company would not be held liable. Not sure this will change any time soon. I agree with you that it would be ridiculous if you are blogging under the name or your company and still use. the disclaimer. What’s the point of the blog then?
Laurie Broderick’s last blog post..laurieab: Why would I Tweet when I am so involved in Facebook? From a recent conversation with my 18 year old.
That’s exactly what this is all about – stripping away the corporate machines and realizing that there are people with voices in there.
This is all going to continue colliding because whether we admit it or not – we’re all just people!
I agree with you – we must stop the madness.
Hey there Beth. Lovin’ the post. I was just speaking to a marketing friend of mine yesterday. She’s all fired up to get going in social media. I said I’d help her with a few tips on getting started and I composed an email. One of the tips was to start a blog. Not a company blog for the firm she works with but one of her own. Why? Because it’s important for her to have a voice and to share her ideas and starting with a company blog means potentially lots of approvals, edits, red tape etc… I also said that “being” in social media means being prepared to be bold and to be herself. That’s a big step for lots of people as you pointed out in your post. But, boy o boy, don’t it feel grrrreat when you break into that mode.
Thanks for the post Beth and the link to “Unmasked Brands.”
Cheers.
David
David Alston’s last blog post..People define Brand “Personality”
Yep – this was me. I originally joined Twitter and Facebook mainly to drive traffic to my blog. That has been a result, but not because I only post links to a blog all day, but because I have made friends who checked me out on their own time. Free will baby!
Todd Schnick’s last blog post..Find Your Creative Space
People know what company I work for and that doesn’t stop me from being me. I post about good days and bad days on the job (communications-related) and I mix in personal stories. Why? Because that is who I am. As long as I am real and true to myself, then my credibility is intact. And that sort of reputation spreads, which I like.
Susan’s last blog post..Repeat after me
@DaveMurr, I don’t think I’ll bore people with an entire blog post!
What I meant by survived was that I put the time in to make Twitter and blogging work for me. I hated Twitter because no one talked back (in this sense I didn’t respect the time it took to acclimate…I didn’t “listen” long enough.) And blogging in the beginning was very hard for me because I watched what everyone did and I thought I needed to compete with that versus having my own voice. So, in a sense, I found my voice and survived trying to be like everyone else. I made my use of social media my own. But, the real survival came when I was implementing social media for two companies that I used to work at and realized that I wasn’t the best social media spokesperson because I didn’t have enough “deep” industry experience. I wasn’t a subject matter expert and that was coming out in anything I wrote. In this case, they were both companies that sold into data centers. I had enough industry experience to market but not enough to have 1:1 discussions with network managers or people running directors. I hope that makes sense. As a marketer, it’s kind of a shot in the arm to realize that even though you might know a lot, you don’t know it all…and social media can point out those weaknesses. That’s why I blog about marketing and not high tech or even high tech marketing (my background). Maybe that’s a blog post… “Why marketers aren’t always the right folks to blog or tweet for a company.” 
@Laurie Broderick, that’s a very valid point about legal requesting it. Thanks for pointing that out.
Hi Beth,
I LOVED your post!
It echoes closely to what I live…and, oh yes! I would love a blog post about what you mentioned in answer to a comment – “Why marketers aren’t always the right folks to blog or tweet for a company.” There is something to digg there, too
I am just back from a 2-days broad meeting with the company teams leaders (the developers are Italians, I’m in Switzerland (but half-Italian), so there was already a communication challenge to bridge our needs, objectives, etc… But can you imagine that I found out that when I was speaking about a company’s blog , they were speaking of an “internal” blog??!! So, I didn’t even ask if someone was feeling like writing some tecnical posts! And I realized that I was the one left for it, but having trouble to imagine exactly what kind of content I could give .. I’ll have to think of it more deeply, but it’s like a “crossing-point” to what you mention in you post.
Hope it was clear enough
Always a pleasure to read your take on things.
Claudia’s last blog post..You know it’s the crisis, when …
I gotta agree with Debra and Laurie above … it comes down to a legal liability issue, in other words, both companies and individuals want to protect their respective a**es.
Yes, it’s absolutely ridiculous, even the companies that claim to “give up control of their brand” and the individuals who preach the same thing for some reason seem to have to put that disclaimer on there “just in case.” If they really walked the walk, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
Stacy Lukas’s last blog post..Q&A with Graham Wallington of WildEarth.tv
Beth,
Great post. As one of those who entered pushing and now simply engage, I couldn’t agree more – and I am the better for it. I blogged about my Facebook sins a while back: http://bit.ly/E5tjU
-Seth
Seth’s last blog post..Rupert Murdoch’s Love of Newspapers Is Weighing on News Corp – NYTimes.com