Bottoms up – Facebook forces the necessary

The social marketing revolution has forced the obvious; a bottom up consumer focus that has oft been preached but rarely implemented.  Why?  Because until social media we never had the physical capability of tapping the consumer psyche 24/7 without spending gobs and gobs of research dollars. And because it threatens the predominant top down structure of most marketing organizations.

Facebook recently hosted marketers for an event designed around their recommendations for organizational restructuring of marketing around Facebook.  In reporting this, Ad Age first calls this move “Audacious” and then within the same sentence gives a nod to the scale and engagement power of Facebook.  Even the brief “audacious” is a response that speaks more to the resistance of the industry to change.  First it was cable, then it was the internet and now it’s social media.  In each instance consumer use continues to outpaced media dollars spent.  In each instance the marketing business resists and lags.

A Technorati blogger recently observed that each new digital evolution changes the organizational structural needs and quoted  “A recent study and report conducted by SODA [Society of Digital Agencies] & Econsultancy, published for Q1 2012, reveals that 73% of brands are restructuring their marketing organizations in response to demands posed by digital media.”

While it may be that future nuances of the trend of marketing reorganization will be dictated by technology, the one dominant power leading the trend is the consumer.  Bottom up marketing that truly listens to the consumer has to focus on the conduit that allows engagement and listening.  That puts Facebook and the other social networks securely in the lead of marketing organization.

Overdue indeed.  It seems that marketers are the last to figure out that top down marketing is passé.