Managerial/ Leadership Strategies: Social vs. Traditional

As the principles and philosophies of traditional and social marketing strategies greatly differ, so too do the managerial and leadership strategies that go along with them.  In order to highlight these differences, we must revisit the goals and content of each strategy.  The fundamental difference between social marketing and traditional marketing is that social marketing involves a conversation both among consumers and between consumers and companies, whereas traditional marketing involves a one-way street of broadcasting messages to mass amounts of people.  This undoubtedly entails vast differences in managerial strategies, which will be the content of this post.

The first, and most obvious evolution in managerial strategy for social marketing involves a conscious focus on maintaining a positive online reputation.  Managers must constantly be aware of what is being said about their companies, and there are many ways to monitor this.  A popular strategy involves enlisting the help of websites such as trackur.com that skim the Internet for relevant information regarding your company, specifically social media sites.  Specifically, Trackur enables the user to check the health of a brand, coordinate with RSS readers, influence and sentiment analysis among other features for the reasonable price of $27 per month.  With over 1 billion users on Facebook alone and many more on various other social media sites, the conversations regarding companies and products that take place in these platforms are overwhelming.  Monitoring and improving the online reputation of a company or brand should be a primary focus of any marketing manager under social marketing, whereas this was not an issue with traditional marketing.

Another strategy that many marketing managers are adapting involves the hiring of a "social media marketing manager".  This is a very loose title, and the specific tasks associated with the position can vary greatly across different fields.  One specific account of such a position can be viewed here.  Generally speaking, a social media marketing manager's sole purpose is to manage the company's presence on social media sites.  Because of the sheer mass of information that is transferred throughout these sites, this position has become something of a necessity.

Those involved in social marketing must also learn to be able to change easily.  One of the benefits of the social marketing age is the increased level of instant feedback from consumers.  This feedback, however, becomes useless if it is not being properly looked at.  Changes can be made from suggestions on social media that could undoubtedly greatly benefit the company in the long run.

It is clear that social marketing managers have much more responsibility than traditional marketing managers.  Where the latter is merely concerned with the process of one message reaching large amounts of people, social marketers must concern themselves with the conversations that occur amongst a large amount of people.