With the soaring popularity and adoption of Social Media, companies are realizing that, in addition to marcom, listening and engagement is quickly becoming pervasive and necessary to compete for precious yet thinned and distributed attention. The days of focusing solely on Web stickiness, eyeballs, and click-throughs are waning. These are the days of immersion, conversations, engagement, relationships, referrals, and action.

We mark this important time in history and note the transformation. Some call it Social Media marketing, others refer to it as conversational marketing, and other thought leaders simply classify it as the socialization of media and marketing in general. In the world of marcom, we’re placing the communication back in communications. It’s the transformation of monologue to dialogue, and it’s breaking down those walls and barriers that separate people from brands. With so many choices and a simple click taking customers to a competitor’s product or service, brands cannot afford to have communication obstacles in this market.

The problem with Social Media marketing and conversational marketing as classifiers is that both still include the word marketing. It doesn’t imply authenticity and the two-way process of listening, internalizing, and responding. Each is complementary to traditional marketing, but their intent, practice, and metrics differ. And the socialization of communications is also unique.

Social Media marketing is using Social Media tools to participate online in distinct people-powered communities. Conversational marketing involves understanding that markets are conversations. In marketing, the term market describes the group of consumers or organizations that might be interested in a product, have the resources to purchase the product, and be permitted by law and other regulations to acquire the product (see www.netmba.com/marketing/market/definition/).

The observation that markets are conversations was originally published in the now iconic book The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The traditional definition of a market refers to an open place where buyers and sellers meet for the sale of products and services. However, today’s markets include online communities that create dynamic conversations between brands and their customers, resulting in purchases. These very conversations create and affect purchasing behavior. A brand cannot thrive in the market if it doesn’t engage in these conversations; therefore, we can now also conclude that, in Social Media, conversations are also markets. Conversations economically impact content and also commerce related to brands, products, and services.

The tools, channels, and approaches differ in today’s market, and actually span across advertising, marketing, SEO, widget marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM), among others. In the world of PR, Social Media marketing primarily concentrates on blogger relations and comment strategies—working with bloggers to retell your story, and sharing feedback and insight within comments that link back to something helpful to the community, while also benefiting the company you’re representing. Again, the difference in each of these disciplines is the intent, execution, and results of any program.

What’s occurring now is so different and revolutionary that this new genre of PR and marketing clearly deserves its own classification. By recognizing this new genre, we will inspire adherents and advance these concepts within organizations, affecting the soul and personality of outward-facing brands and dictating an entirely new and proactive role within society. For the first time in years, we might need to adapt Lasswell’s much-studied communications theory to describe the field of marketing in a New Media world.

In 1949, American political scientist and sociologist Harold Lasswell introduced an important communications model:

Dissecting Lasswell’s model, we can conclude the following:

Because we now live in an economy driven by the socialization and democratization of content and the empowerment of a new class of citizen influencers, Lasswell’s model could evolve into something that more accurately reflects New Media:

The definitions and results will radically vary depending on how you use those variables and which marketing or media discipline you represent. The difference is that Lasswell’s model had an implied beginning and a conclusion. Social Media is pervasive and regenerates thoughts and ideas through a cyclical process of listening, discovering, sharing, and contributing personal or professional perspective:

Social Media is forcing the evolution of all marketing and Public Relations. It’s now the art and science of socializing _____ (fill in the blank).

We refer to this era as our “industrial revolution.” Brian discussed the topic in a recent landmark post on his blog: PR 2.0.

We need to consider that if we’re in the throes of a social revolution, does the act of socializing outbound communications require a new division within an organization?

We think so, at least for now (even though Social Media is a stage in the overall evolution of marketing and media, and it will give way to something new and different). In the meantime, what do we name this new division or discipline, and is it just an extension of the existing marketing department that already encompasses advertising, PR, marketing, the Web, and New Media? A rapidly growing list of organizations are hiring experts to lead the integration, with some earning titles of Social Media officer and complementing existing chief marketing officers.

No shortage of genuine and purported Social Media experts and Social Media gurus exists. But what does it mean to be an expert, and, more important, who’s truly qualified to socialize real-world marketing departments with real-world business demands, dependencies, infrastructure, opportunities, and responsibilities? The answer is this: those with the experience and the understanding of business and service dynamics and how the socialization of communications, development, and support impacts and benefits people and their peers. It’s that simple. And it’s not the level of experience that one earns from talking about Social Media or just participating in the newest networks.

It takes more than the ability to listen to people and then engage. It definitely encompasses more than the skill to create profiles on every popular social platform and befriend everyone across the networks. It’s the ability to identify meaningful conversations, comprehend them, determine those valuable enough to participate, and then feed that collective insight back into the organization (marketing, service, product development, and so on) for positive change. It also requires the knowledge to uncover opportunities and crises to “trendcast” into proactive initiatives that prevent reactionary and defensive responses.

Web and social tech expert Louis Gray calls Social Media experts the “new” Webmasters. Social tools developer Greg Narain compares the current state of Social Media to the e in the old e-conomy. Early on, we predicted that we would eventually see Social Media officers as the new chief marketing officers. We were correct. These views share the belief that these classifiers emerged to document important shifts, migrations, and growth stages of new media, and the roles that further solidified them as catalysts for maturation. Obviously, we need a new, important stepping-stone to escalate to the next phase in influencer and customer interaction.

Brian Morrissey wrote in a recent article for Adweek (July 14, 2008) that brands need a new kind of leader, claiming, “As conversations with customer[s] matter more, brands seek social-media evangelists.” So which division within an organization is ready to fund this experimentation? Perhaps it’s not just one division, but instead an amalgamation of several departments.

Experience has shown that it’s different depending on the company and the champions within it:

We, too, have recently received calls from various brands (major beverage and food companies, auto, aerospace, power, and entertainment) asking advice and seeking referrals for an internal social champion and expert (all within the same week of writing this chapter).

The list goes on. These stories represent only a few of the bigger shifts within existing marketing departments as they attempt to socialize their brands.

These are the times when the social revolution is redefining not only how you communicate with the representatives in your communities, but also how, as a collective organization of people, you process the information, intelligence, and insight garnered from external conversations to more effectively and genuinely participate.

But Social Media isn’t limited to marketing or outbound activity. Social Media benefits and develops every department within an organization. Therefore, the future of Social Media and its effectiveness depends on the champions, participants, analysts, and opportunists who are actively involved.

The intelligence collected while listening and observing affects everything. You can improve your products and services based on the real-world input and feedback from a true, vested public focus group. You can improve and tailor your story specifically to the assemblies of people you’re hoping to reach in a way that’s convincing and accurate. You can enhance your inbound customer service practices to transform cost centers into customer investments. In the process, you’re humanizing your brands and transforming customers into evangelists, people into storytellers, and brands into resource centers.

The goal is to connect brands, and the people representing them, to new groups of important people in the places where they discover and share new content and, in turn, interact with each other. This is the latest incarnation of digital communications, and for the moment, it takes us back to the foundation of relationships that started everything. This time, however, it’s not only the tools that have changed, but also the realization that people matter to everything you do.

This is the socialization of

Whatever discipline you represent, you are the champion for the socialization of that branch, as it relates to the greater good of the company, the brand, and all stakeholders. Only you can specifically understand how social strategies affect and complement the daily campaigns already working well for your organization.

Ultimately, each department will independently implement and deploy social initiatives, working with a social coordinator such as a community manager, in conjunction with a chief marketing officer, vice president of marketing, or even chief social officer. Everything depends on the existing infrastructure and social savvy of the organization. However, social initiatives won’t always be rooted just in social strategies. As the communications landscape evolves, new and interactive media will continue to influence business. The landscape of communications and the tools used to connect people and stories will continue to evolve. Remember, this is about the sociology of Social Media. Technology changes; people don’t.

Wait until you see how semantic platforms, which many hail as the next iteration of the Web, will change the dynamics of information discovery, creation, and connectivity. In the meantime, the future of your business depends on champions emerging who will implement and justify your company’s socialization—its ability to listen, empathize, respond, advise, and evolve based on the online discussions currently occurring with or without you.