So, I went off on a bit of a tangent on my @StadiumInsider Twitter account. This has nothing to do with the Yankees, but I hope it wasn’t lost on EVERYONE who just expects random Yankees chatter from me.
Just in case it WAS lost on everyone, I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost into space with the rest of the world’s tweets.
This will most likely become a discussion about CRM (customer relationship management), which I know of, but haven’t ever studied technically. These are merely my ramblings on the subject and how it ties in with brand PR/marketing. When I’m referring to brand PR/marketing, I’m referring to “old school” brands that are making strides in reaching thought leaders and influencers, but are still doing a lot of their PR in an “old-fashioned” or “traditional” way. Brands that are still sending paper press kits, broad, shot in the dark pitch mailings, running around trying to prove their worth, etc.
PR and marketing folks need to continue to focus their energies on being connectors, like they always have. However, now their job is to connect the thought leaders or influencers (the people who spread information to the masses) with their key decision makers in the organization.
It is then up to the key decision makers to evaluate the new found knowledge so they’re not just listening to every Tom, Dick and Harry that doesn’t have anything useful to share. The organization must somehow develop metrics that help analyze this data or outsource that job to a third party. Next, the organization must act on the decidedly good knowledge (based on the aforementioned metrics) that was provided to them by the influencer or thought leader.
The resulting action must then be communicated back to the public, and this is where the PR or Marketing team comes back into play. They can now reach back out to to the thought leaders or influencers and explain how their ideas were acted upon. The message being delivered this way ensures that the brand’s news isn’t only reaching a lot of people, but the RIGHT people.
Old school brand PR and Marketing teams are constantly wasting time trying to develop metrics for how well their activities are effecting the bottom line. If they can help to perfect the process of reaching the key influencers and thought leaders (a tough task, but not an impossible one), they can simply continue to do their job as connectors, involve all parts of the business and share in the glory when sales explode.
Pretty sure I wasn’t the first to think of any of this, and some of the “social media experts” that I’m making fun of probably have been saying it for years, but I had to get it off of my chest.
Update: And one of my Twitter followers has pointed me in the direction of Seth Godin, whom I somehow had never heard of (now I’m reading his books). It seems that he has been saying much of what I say above for a while now. So why the heck are so many companies not listening?
