Crucial, Irrelevant, and Reporting to Marketing 🫡

In my first corporate social media role, I reported to marketing. I assumed that was where social belonged because it was the only structure I had ever experienced.

The org chart told me who I reported to. I also took it as an explanation of what social was.

What I remember most about that arrangement is feeling both crucial and irrelevant. When I thought something happening on social deserved more attention, it did not always fit the current marketing objectives. When I thought something was relatively minor, it could become an emergency.

The example I always come back to is a typo in a tweet. Something easy to correct, with very little damage done, could be treated like a humanitarian crisis. The level of drama felt wildly out of proportion to the problem.

Meanwhile, other things I believed required more care or focus struggled to get it. I could be responsible for this supposedly important public presence and still find that my judgment about what needed attention carried very little weight.

That was the confusing part. Social mattered enormously, apparently. Whether my understanding of social mattered depended on the circumstances.

At the time, I had very little basis for questioning the arrangement. Later workplaces gave me something to compare it with. I started to see how differently an organization could understand the same work, depending on where it put the person responsible for doing it.

Then I reported to brand

Then I experienced social reporting to brand.

In a conversation with the VP of brand, she told me she had been in my role when she first started. That was illuminating. Here was someone in a leadership position who understood the importance of social from having done the job herself.

I remember the feeling more clearly than any departmental explanation I could give you:

The importance of social felt understood. It felt like a high priority, which matched how I felt about the work. That understanding carried through my experience in the role, and the difference was loud.

I felt cared for as the person responsible for social. In environments with a different structure, I had not experienced that same feeling.

That is where my preference comes from. I learned what it felt like to have the work understood by the people responsible for supporting it.

Why marketing isn’t the whole story

It is also why the title needs a little explanation.

Marketing involves communication, and social can be excellent marketing. I have spent plenty of my career using it to support campaigns, recruitment, launches and sales. My objection is to promotion becoming the entire explanation for social's existence. Social is communication with people whose relationship to an organization continues between campaigns.

A person asking a question, challenging a claim or describing a disappointing experience has their own reason for talking to you. The marketing calendar provides very little guidance about how much that conversation matters.

Marketing, communications and brand

This is why I care about the distinctions between marketing, communications and brand. Organizations use those terms differently, so I want to explain what I mean by them.

I think of marketing as the function concerned with understanding an audience, developing demand and encouraging action. What do people need? Why would they choose us? How do we reach them, and what do we want them to do? Depending on the organization, the action might be buying something, submitting an application or attending an event.

That gives marketing a particular focus. A campaign has objectives, an audience and a result it is trying to achieve. Social has a useful role in that work.

Communications has a wider set of relationships to consider. Customers, employees, partners, journalists and the public may all need information from an organization. They may also have information the organization needs to hear. I think of communications as helping that exchange happen clearly and responsibly, with attention to trust and understanding.

That includes explaining decisions, responding to concerns and recognizing when people need an answer even though there is nothing to promote.

Brand gives these efforts a shared direction. For me, brand includes what an organization stands for, the expectations people attach to it and the experience that teaches them whether those expectations are justified. Identity, voice and positioning help express it. Decisions and behaviour have to carry it.

Marketing can make a compelling promise. Communications can explain it beautifully. The experience still has to hold up.

The structure I favour

The structure I favour gives brand a clear leadership role, with marketing and communications as distinct functions beneath it. I want social held within that wider brand responsibility, with a mandate to work across both.

That gives each function a focus while making someone responsible for the relationship between them. Brand leadership should help resolve the decisions that reach beyond one team's immediate objectives: what we can credibly promise, how we should behave and what deserves attention when priorities compete.

Distinct responsibilities should make collaboration easier. People should know what expertise each function brings and who can make a decision when their objectives pull in different directions. Otherwise, “we all work together” can leave a lot of room for whoever has the most urgent request.

For social, this matters because several kinds of work happen through the same account. An organization might publish a promotion, answer a service question and explain an operational change in the same afternoon. The audience experiences all of that as contact with one organization.

They have very little reason to care which department supplied the copy.

A useful structure has to account for that whole experience. It should help the social lead decide what needs attention and provide the support to act on that judgment.

This is also where proportion matters. A typo deserves a correction. A genuine public concern may deserve investigation, coordination and a decision from someone with authority. The person closest to the conversation should have a meaningful role in assessing both.

I want the social lead to have access to information early enough to do the job thoughtfully. By the time a completed campaign arrives with a request to post it, many of the choices that will shape the response have already been made. Earlier involvement creates room to consider what people are likely to need, misunderstand or question.

I want listening to have somewhere to go, too. If the audience keeps raising the same concern, the social person needs a route to someone who can act on it. There should be time for that work, a practical way to escalate it and a clear sense of who owns the next step.

Voice requires judgment as well. A promotional caption and a response to someone having a difficult experience call for different choices. The social lead needs enough context and authority to make those choices while keeping the organization's character recognizable.

These are the kinds of responsibilities I want a reporting structure to support. They also explain why being understood by leadership felt so significant to me.

The human part

There is a human consideration here. When you are the sole social person, being told the work matters has to come with support you can use. You need people who understand its scope and can help when it reaches beyond your authority.

The VP of brand's experience mattered to how supported I felt. I cannot separate that from the structure and credit the org chart for everything. Her understanding was part of what made that environment work for me.

A brand department can have poor leadership. A marketing team can give social a broad, thoughtful mandate. Moving a box on a chart will accomplish very little if the same assumptions and habits follow it.

My preference for brand leadership comes from experience. I would judge any arrangement by what it allows the person to do and how well it helps the organization respond to its audience.

Audit your own setup

For a leader considering their own setup, I would start with two ordinary pieces of work.

First, follow one post through the organization. Choose something routine enough that people will describe what usually happens. Where does the request begin? Who decides whether it belongs on social? Who approves it, and what are they checking? Can the social lead change the approach based on their knowledge of the audience?

Pay attention to where judgment is allowed and where the person is expected to execute a decision already made.

Then follow one customer concern, preferably something that requires an answer from another department. Who sees it first? How does the social lead get reliable information? Who can authorize a solution, and who makes sure the person receives a response?

In each case, look for where the audience's experience enters the decision. You should also be able to identify who owns brand judgment and how campaign demands are balanced with the needs of people already talking to you.

If one person carries all of that responsibility, inspect the access and authority you have given them.

My first corporate role gave me one understanding of where social belonged. Working elsewhere helped me recognize it as a choice. Being supported under brand showed me how much that choice could mean to the person doing the work.

Leaders can start by asking whether their structure gives social the authority to look after the brand as well as publish for it.

The Sunday Social goes out every week. If this one was worth your time, pass it on to the person who decides where social sits on your org chart.