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?