Tra­di­tional com­pa­nies often have a hard time deal­ing with social media mar­ket­ing — for many rea­sons. One of them lies in the dif­fi­culty of prop­erly “syn­chro­niz­ing” their var­i­ous online mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. The fol­low­ing anec­dote shows that in some cases pub­lic rela­tions and mar­ket­ing heav­ily dis­agree when it comes to chos­ing the right busi­ness partners.

Act 1: An online retailer is plan­ning a PR event. The PR woman con­tacts me to tell me that this event is very inter­est­ing for my read­ers and that I should con­sider pub­lish­ing a pre­view post. Hap­pens all the time — but amaz­ingly enough, in this case she was right.

Act 2 / dif­fer­ent stage, same play: A cou­ple of weeks before I had applied as an affil­i­ate with the same com­pany — they were listed with a large inter­na­tional net­work, the appli­ca­tion itself just requires two clicks. Just a few min­utes after the e-mail about the PR event (which was related to their prod­uct port­fo­lio) and a  cou­ple of weeks after my appli­ca­tion I received the fol­low­ing (text-module based) notification:

Your appli­ca­tion for the part­ner pro­gram ‘XXXXXXX” with your URL-account ‘daten­schmutz blog’ unfor­tu­nately was denied.

Pos­si­ble rea­sons:
* Your site does not meet the merchant’s con­tent require­ments
* Your site is in an unfin­ished state or is not work­ing properly

Indeed… the sec­ond argu­ment is very true: my blog will never be fin­ished, it’s an ongo­ing project I’m fully aware of the fact that two dif­fer­ent peo­ple are respon­si­ble for these two fields — yet suc­cess­fully “syn­chro­niz­ing” a company’s online activ­ity range is one of the main web 2.0 mar­ket­ing chal­lenges. This has a lot do with inter­nal knowl­edge man­age­ment and com­mu­ni­ca­tion struc­tures, and these fac­tors have played a vital role long before social media existed — but there is one huge dif­fer­ence: social media points out short-comings in this area most effectively.

I know this may come as a bit of the shock: but the mar­ket­ing, the adver­tis­ing, the PR, the IT and all the other depart­ments must start talk­ing to each other and focus on a com­mon strat­egy. Great remu­ner­a­tion awaits: it’s called authenticity.