Explore our Social Media Marketing Toolkit

Why a narrow focus on social media can limit its impact

Author's avatar By 02 May, 2012
Essential Essential topic

The UK is 2 years behind with social media!

Having spent two days at the UK Social Media World Forum recently it seems to me that UK industry remains roughly two years behind North America and many countries in the Far East. Companies in South America also seem to be developing at a faster rate.

While the conference was about social media, I felt it had a very narrow focus, a focus on how to use social media for marketing campaigns. This is fine, marketers want to know this! But there are bigger strategy questions to ask. In my view, social media is not as effective for short term tactical campaigns without a wider content and engagement strategy. It works best when integrated across the business as this recent report by McKinsey suggested.

Don't get me wrong, there were many useful sessions for example, there was a panel session (summary) that showed how social media is very effective for managing other areas of business.

Visiting social media conferences in other countries such as the USA and Japan, I can see that the scope of social media is much broader and attracts not just those in marketing but COO’s, HR Directors, e-Commerce Managers and so on.

Organisations in these countries are already using social media for recruitment, innovation, competitive analysis, employee collaboration, e-learning, supply chain management, procurement, community management and many more areas of business management and civil services.

Moving from tactics to strategy

Business leaders in the UK need to get to grips with social media make it strategic and assign specialists expertise to the role of leading the social media charge and don’t leave it to the marketing professionals alone. Otherwise, foreign competitors will yet again steal the march on UK industry.

A massive change in mind set is called for in the UK. Start by putting Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc out of your mind and begin thinking that social media is about business transformation, agility, competitive advantage, resource optimisation, improving time to market and such matters.

Author's avatar

By

Recommended Blog Posts