Big Brands and Social Media

Interesting post from Mashable on why big brand struggle with social media. I won't restate what he covered in his article but rather give my two cents as a 'big brand' marketer. I think brands are beginning to want to understand it. I think the two main challenges I've seen coming from the big brand perspective are;

1. who owns it?

I've talked about this before and still believe it depends on your brands goals. It should also be stated that multiple groups can participate. We have lots of people across PR, customer support and marketing that Twitter, blog, etc. We have a very large, vibrant MVP community that loves to help talk about our brand. We make it part of our DNA to embrace the conversations from multiple channels.

2. how the heck does it play with our campaigns.

Marketing teams and budgets are inherently driven by campaign timelines. Marketing has not historically run on a 24/7 timeline, which is what it takes to make social media work for a brand. Our anytime, anywhere approach works for our team because we are not on the campaigns team. Windows has a campaigns team that we partner with to leverage the creative assets, messaging, themes, etc but we are not driven by their calendar for outreach. It took awhile for our executives to quite know where to put our efforts but we've landed in a great place. We are on the digital marketing team, the same team that runs Windows.com. This digital team is focused on customer experiences and partners with campaigns to promote them when available but the goal is customer experience.

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