Where exactly should social media fall in the organizational structure?

By Zia Namooya

It’s not an easy question to answer as different organizations have different strengths, weaknesses and established silos of discipline.

My honest answer is that social media should be the responsibility of public relations. Or at least that is how I see social media’s evolution.

The reason is simple.

Social media is a method of communications. Social media tools facilitate these communications. To be effective in social media, whether as a marketer or just an ordinary participant, you must, first and foremost, communicate well. Yes, social media tools are mostly driven by technology. But they are driven by technology to deliver a message or messages. You don’t trust your IT department to layout your print ad. Why would you trust them to run your blog?

As I’ve said before, we are in an era of technology transition. Communications professionals are learning quickly that to be relevant and effective in the age of social computing, there’s more to competency than communication skills. Technology has become a requirement of the skill set. Yet, so many communications professionals – from public relations to customer service staff and from copywriters to journalists – are horribly deficient in average computer understanding, much less that of web-based technologies and tools.

Therefore, I would not plant social media efforts totally on the shoulders of the public relations staff today, unless of course your PR department can exhibit the kind of tech-savviness required to accept the responsibility. I would, instead, employ a specialist in social media (or hire an agency with one … have no idea who I’d recommend though … heh) who reports to the same person or department as the public relations director with both instructed to work hand-in-hand on social media projects.

What is most telling in your social media efforts is the message. And that is most likely already being supplied by your public relations or communications arm. If you see social media as technology-driven, you probably have your website run by the IT department when it often is, first and foremost, a marketing mechanism.

As soon as three to five years from now, I see social media marketing as an almost exclusive domain of public relations professionals, so long as we get our collective heads out of our asses and learn how to do it. Some of us are there. Many of us are not. Too many of us think social media is newspapers in Eastern Europe!