Deciding who takes the lead on social media is one of the biggest questions that big brands (and lesser mortals) are facing today. I recently wrote a post about the best social media management structures for large organisations, highlighting the point that moving towards ‘holistic’ social media management is a process of evolution that shouldn’t be rushed. Yet, whether they acknowledge the fact or not, the battle for control of social media is already raging within most organisations, with the biggest point of friction existing between Customer Services and Marketing.

I’ve long been an advocate of “enlightened” social media marketing (based on trust and value)  yet as a Marketer, no matter how helpful you are, your reason for being is, fundamentally, to generate customer leads. At some point, no matter how helpful you are, you must sell your products. As a Marketer, your boss is the bottom line, everything else is a value-add.

Customer Services, on the other hand, exists to promote the happiness of the customer. As a Customer Support operative your goal is to retain customers by championing their needs and grievances within the company. As Frank Eliason (SVP Social Media, Citi) said – emphatically – at Social CRM New York in November, “when you’re in Customer Care, your boss is the customer!”

With this in mind, and while I prepare for my London conference on Social Customer engagement on 29th March (at which Frank is the afternoon Keynote) I was interested to read Joshua March’s post on The Social Customer “2012: The Year Social Marketing and Social Customer Service Get Cosy“. Josh, who heads up the social engagement platform Conversocial, was also a speaker at Social CRM New York and I agree with a lot of what he says in this article. There’s no doubt that in most companies that Marketing is still leading the charge with social media – and yet, to my mind, there’s also no doubt that the future lies with Customer Services.

I would go further, though. I would say that greatest opportunity for businesses to profit from social media exists in customer service driven strategies. To reap the word-of-mouth/referral benefits that customer happiness produces, the customer perspective must be central to the initial strategy. Put another way, companies that allow Marketing to drive their social media strategies are stepping off on the wrong foot – and may end up on the wrong track altogether.

This may be a question, not about businesses, but about the evolution of business on the Internet. Many businesses are still engaged in a virtual land-grab for online market share and “share of voice”. In such a phase they might be excused for emphasising marketing over customer care. Perhaps when the online space settle down, with a few large incumbents in each industry, we’ll see a greater keenness to focus on customer happiness. The problem with this is, online reputations stick like mud: get it wrong today and there’s no guarantee consumers will give you an opportunity to redeem yourself tomorrow.

I’ll be discussing strategies, tools and techniques for social customer engagement with Frank Eliason (Citi), Bian Salins (BT), Guy Stephens (CapGemini), Martin Hill-Wilson (Brainfood) and others at The Social Customer in London on 29th April. I hope you can join us for what promises to be a fascinating day.

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg made his F8 presentation and demonstrated the soon-to-be-released Facebook Timeline, News Ticker and other assorted Facebook changes, marketing teams have been dissecting his words for hints of new opportunities, and perhaps lost ones.

But what does it all mean for customer services?

I’m diligently researching the topic in preparation for Social CRM 2011 in New York next month, so I attended the excellent Chinwag event London on Weds which included a presentation from Facebook. This highlighted a couple of critical changes for any business that uses Facebook as one of their customer communication channels.

Firstly we have the demise of the Discussion tab. This was a surprise to many, but not to those who’ve tried to manage customer engagement through the limited, linear interface they offer. In spite of it’s limitations, companies tended to like the Discussion tab because it channelled dissenters into a manageable space and acted, to an extent, like a feedback forum. The problem was, Facebook users never really took to them. Consequently, they will be phased out at the end of the month.

Facebook is, rightly, responding to its users and focusing on enabling discussion in the here and now, on the Timeline, in the News Ticker and on status updates, rather than in a silo off your main page. In this sense, it’s a positive move, yet it does raise issues for customer services… Expect to have more negative comments front-of-house, right in your timeline. Expect off-topic comments coming at you from all angles. Experienced community managers are used to dealing with dispersed conversations across multiple channels, but it won’t make their jobs any easier.

The other big change is that, shortly, people will no longer need to Like your Page in order to comment on it. Most customer service teams would say the current setup, whereby a user Like’s your page and, in doing so, is both enabled to post and provides permission for the company to reply to them privately, has worked adequately well.

The new change raises a big question: if users don’t need to Like your page to comment, do they still grant you permission to contact them privately, or do you have to reply publicly? (Not ideal for sensitive issues). Gavin Sathianathan from Facebook’s UK Partnerships team, who spoke yesterday (pictured above), explained that this isn’t the case. The act of granting permission will now happen when a person writes a comment on your page, rather than when they Like it.

This shaking up of a system that, after some teething problems, people have come to understand raises a whole new set of privacy and usability issues. I guess we’ll just have to see how it works out.

The question being – does the character (or “brand”) of a company dictate how successful it is likely to be in social media? Does a laid-back, fun-loving, youthful company stand a better chance of success on Facebook, Twitter and the like than an ancient, grey, corporate monolith?

Well, as Amelia Torode of VCCP (who was on the same panel as Ted) pointed out, some large corporates have such torturous processes and regulations that it takes at least  48 hours for a Tweet to be approved by the lawyers – if indeed it is approved! This would make for rather stilted conversations, to say the least. In my experience the unwillingness for companies to free up staff and allow them to engage with customers via social media is subsiding – but there are undoubtedly still a large number of bosses who don’t “get” social media and shudder at the thought of their IT Support guy talking to customers.

But the question goes deeper than mere attitudes. Should the ethos of a company preclude it from engaging in social media? Or, put another way, are some companies so dowdy and uncool that encountering them on Facebook would feel like getting a friend request from your dad?

The fact that BT, Dell and other huge corporates have successfully integrated Twitter into their customer services offerings proves that, if the need exists, people will engage with corporates via social media. Now, it’s tempting to say that this isn’t marketing – it’s “customer services” – but I think the days of those silos have gone. In social media customer services IS marketing precisely because it’s SOCIAL. In these terms the BT brand – which definitely isn’t young, hip and cool – is doing just fine using social media.

So perhaps the question is: does being a funky, relaxed kind of brand help a company to engage via social media? Well, I think it might help in terms of the tone of voice. There’s nothing quite like the fear of getting the sack for killing off any cheeky comments and jokes you might want to share with customers. If the organisation is more easy going, the real character of it’s staff can come through online – and that’s absolute gold in terms of online engagement. Witness the huge success of Amelia’s Compare the MeerKat Twitter account, in which Aleksandr the Russian Meerkat and his IT guy, Sergei, entertain 30,000 followers with their Meerkat price comparison chatter.  Price comparison ain’t that interesting, until you add a couple of speaking, Russian, Meerkats. There’s a lesson for big business in there somewhere.

Tickets are still available for our conference: Monitoring Social Media 09 , London, 17th November