The Re-incarnated CMOs = The Social CMOs

Traditionally, enterprises and individuals used to seek peers’ advice to make buying decisions. It’s changing fast. They explore the solution or product providers’ Websites first and understand their service capabilities by participating in online communities to make buying decisions. Buyers are no longer skeptical of solution providers who now understand the importance of the depth and quality of thought leadership and accordingly host content on their Websites and online communities. Websites represent enterprises. And, thus Website development and maintenance is the marketers’ first preferred functional activity. These are considered as the number 1 source of information, especially during the early stages of the buying process.

Social enterprises expect the already confused and tired-of-not-being-able-to-measure-the-performance CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) to try Social and drive business. If you look at the marketing functions and the key marketing strategies, Social Media is one of the key marketing programs. Everyone wants to get into that. The dilemma is that traditional marketers don't know how to do this whereas the ones who know hardly understand the purpose of running it as a marketing function. Experts say that in future, Social Media expertise will be the key requirement for all the marketers. Is this really true? What about brand managers? In the era of Social, every employee would be the brand ambassador and every employee on Social Media would be the brand manager. The companies will have to be very transparent as well as alert to sense negative noise.

Today, the world’s fastest growing companies are on the rise without any promotions, especially true in the case of recently established Social businesses. For example, Facebook’s user base turned 1 billion members without any promotions. It was all through the word of mouth on the Web. The Social networking site never used the traditional marketing tools, such as advertisements. Does this mean we don’t need to invest in marketing? Not necessarily.

Having said that the challenge comes in when you know that you need to invest in marketing but you don’t know in what, when and why. If you go by the latest trend in the market, you would try every bit of paid Social promotions as part of your overall marketing strategies. And, the Social CMOs would need establish "The New ROI Factory".