This is some stuff I banged out for a recent Neilson Online newsletter.

It’s brief, and shallow, but it addresses something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and working on with our clients. The ‘who owns this’ part of the getting to grips with social web and online conversations.

I keep drawing this picture to illustrate the challenge:

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Who owns the social media beast?

Suddenly the world is different…
In the good old days everything was safe, stable and known inside the big corporation. We were cosy.

Marketing created the outgoing noise. Customer services dealt with the incoming noise. PR owned the media. And Brand owned the brand. Yeah this is overly facile, but the divisions on the playing field were pretty clear, and were largely respected. And then the internet changed everything.

Now social media, with consumers publishing and sharing digital oceans of content amongst one another on a flattened, frictionless, disintermediated plane, has made a nonsense of our demarcated areas of responsibility. For example, if a consumer publishes a hate-ridden review of a new mobile phone, and many other consumers join in, adding their weight to the story which gains momentum and swirls and snarls and bites, is this a PR issue, or a marketing issue, or a product issue, or a customer services issue? Who ‘owns’ the social media beast?

The answer, we think, is easy. Everyone!
It’s true but it’s probably not what we want as senior people or business owners (and I know, because I am one). which is usually a simple focused solution: a clear one-stop go-to-man approach. ‘We’ll appoint someone: David owns social media!’ Nope. It won’t work.

The clue is in the problem.
Social media is very hard to define because it the spaces, channels and technologies are many, and ever-proliferating, and the content, the topic matter, is as broad as life itself. Fascinated by ant farms? Find everything you need to know online. Desperate to know who King Tubby is? Find the answer and his biggest fans online. So the challenges and opportunities that our businesses face in this new online era are as multi-coloured and multi-flavoured as we can imagine (and then some) - they will cut across every part of our organisation, of our industry and of our brands.

So we all own this social media beast.

You own your part of it. If you’ve buried your head or hoped and expected Ted in marketing to pick this up, think again. The world is out there. Your impenetrable company fortress walls have been broken. So whether you’re in market research or engineering, take a peek outside. Start listening and learning and participating in the conversations. The sooner you do, the better you’ll do. Take ownership of your part today - you won’t regret it.

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Yes? No? Bovvered?