Every marketer, ad man (or woman), PR executive advertising or digital marketer has to embrace social media skills within their focus areas – it’s a resource-wide skill requirement. The sea change of how marketing and communication is being conducted in a post-digital world means that social media has taken a platform (as opposed to a channel) role, even beyond traditional media such as television or print.

Many social media players will say that marketers should outsource to social media agencies, as they would digital or PR  agencies, but in my opinion, this is a false choice. Visit every PR agency, advertising agency, digital agency, BTL agency or even events agency, and they will tell you all the great things that they are doing in social media as support platforms for their communication initiatives. Social media is simply not another marketing channel.

Recently, a few of the highest profile social media thinkers have been making moves to PR agency groups, the most notable being David Armano. Armano’s move, as one of the guiding lights of social media strategy globally, to the Edelman agency served as a lightning rod for discussion around the fit between social media and public relations.

The debate centred around opposing views of where social media as a skills set would end up settling, both in terms of organisational structure and relating to agency partners. As much as social media experts will say that they hold unique abilities in developing and translating campaigns on social media platforms, I believe that this requires a deeper understanding of customer engagement.  Whilst social media is a marketing-wide skill requisite, it fits most neatly being driven side-by-side with public relations skills.

Let’s be frank, before the term ‘earned media’ became a buzzword amongst the social media crew, it’s essentially exactly what PR agencies have been doing for decades. Public relations (much wider than media relations alone) is all about connecting a brand to its audiences, using media pitching to create free publicity (earned media), events and one-to-one interactions to drive word of mouth and brand engagement (sound familiar?), the influencing of opinion leaders (ditto) and the creation of public campaigns to educate and affect perception of target consumers about the brand (still with me?).

Social media lives on a digital platform, but digital platforms are the delivery vehicle; the understanding and strategy goes back to customer engagement theory. There is absolutely no doubt that crafting social media strategy requires hand-in-hand development with digital agencies, as they best understand the possibilities and capabilities of the digital platforms. But when tying into broader marketing strategies that solve business issues, I believe that the strategy will not be driven by digital agencies or digital specialists but led by those with communications and customer engagement experience and skills – both traditional public relations skills.

I posed the question of whether social media’s most natural fit is with PR to Steve Rubel, Director of Insights at Edelman Digital on Twitter. His answer summarised my thinking in 140 characters:

“I believe lots of agencies will be involved in social media but that PR will often drive the strategy.”

What do you think? Where do you think the future of social media strategy will lie?

Now we’ve all got very caught up in 2008 and 2009 about the explosion of social media and how that has turned the marketer-customer relationship on its head. Social media has essentially turned low-impact, low-reach word of mouth into high-impact, high-reach communication. It’s taken conversations between limited physical social circles and lifted them onto virtual but global social media platforms, with much greater opportunities – and threats – to brands.

However, what’s been lost in our love affair with social media, is that consumer choice, and the consumer’s role in using those choices, is the true driver of consumer empowerment. In truth, social media is a platform for conversation around brands and in the modern sense, the focal point of consumer empowerment, but choice is the driver. If there was little or no brand choice (such as existed in the closed apartheid brand environment in the 80′s in South Africa), there would be no empowerment.

As consumers gained more information from more sources and greater access to competitive product options within categories, they made more informed purchases, and were more vocal about making brand choices based on both a demand for greater satisfaction and for the non-tangible communication that brand purchases attached to them. It’s important to note that I’m not referring to social media here; the antecedents can be found in the media proliferation of the late 80′s and 90′s, the explosion of brand choices in product categories over the 90′s and the (terribly-phrased but what else can we call them) Noughties, and the general comparative product information and testimonials available on the internet in the pre-social media online environment.

Greater access to product information in conjunction with wider brand choices, allowed consumers to both express themselves more and demand more from their product purchases. This, along with the frustration with a daily bombardment of broadcast advertising messages, led to greater and more vocal challenging of the fact and fiction of marketing messages and thus, increased ownership of brand choice. Empowerment, through choice.

Anyway, that’s a digression from Mitchell’s timely op-ed piece. He asserts that consumer empowerment in this modern social media world is based on choice, voice, the ability to specify needs and wants, and the control over what he calls ‘choice architecture’:

“The first level is choice. The classic arena of choice is between competing products and services. More recently, however, consumers have also gained much greater choice over the sources of information they pay attention to. This has huge implications for marketing communications.

The second level is voice. Consumers’ ability to use online social media to publicly express their views and feelings is a hot topic. Viral messages have far-reaching implications for reputation management. As Bond noted: ‘Within seconds, customers can compare notes, demolish price structures, destroy marketing strategies and tell the world to shop elsewhere.’ If, that is, there is a genuine ‘elsewhere’.

Another layer of voice, with even bigger implications, is consumers’ ability to volunteer information about themselves: who they are; what they want; what they want to find out about; what their changing life circumstances and goals are. Volunteered personal information could, literally, turn many aspects of marketing upside-down – into a process driven not by marketers, but by consumers.

A third level of empowerment is the ability to specify what I want, how and when. This is more about empowering processes rather than choice or voice.

A fourth level of empowerment is control over ‘choice architectures’ – the ways in which our choices are constructed, framed and presented in the first place.

This really does put the cat among the marketing pigeons. A menu in a restaurant is an example of a choice architecture. Yes, the menu ‘empowers’ diners via choice, but the restaurant-owner retains power as the ‘choice architect’, selecting what choices his customers are presented with.”

We are experiencing a radical shift in the marketing environment and more particularly, in the marketer-consumer relationship. This shift has yet to complete its course and there will undoubtedly be further changes to the marketing mindset as consumers begin to realise the potential power that they hold. One would argue that is not yet the case, where consumers are becoming more vocal and finding their feet in this new ‘empowered’ environment, but there hasn’t been the collective harnessing of this power over brands as yet.

It’s going to be a really wild ride, but brands have to understand their role in the process and work with their customers to ascertain the right level of empowerment that is right for the brand. Too little, and consumers will make other choices; too much, and the brand will cease to have an identity.