Is Social Media Marketing a Marketing or PR Function?

Ever since the early days of social media, I have been struck by the crossover between social media and public relations.

By WendyB on Mar 24, 2009

Ever since the early days of social media, I have been struck by the crossover between social media and public relations. Many of the basic rules of engagement are the same - be honest, be transparent, be timely, be relevant, seek advocates.

Since I am now a digital marketer with a public relations (PR) background, the happy marriage of these two worlds is rather fun for me on the agency side. Sure, we have the occasional turf battle with other agencies jockeying for position in this new space. And I think our clients struggle with this a bit, too ... the brand teams want to work with their digital marketing agencies and the public relations departments want to work with their PR agencies. But in my experience, there is plenty of work to go around, especially in the pharma world where we are really just getting started.

Of course, the holy grail would be for PR and Marketing (and perhaps even - gasp - Sales!) to get together on their social media strategies. The right approach would be to take a look at all marketing and advertising activities - including PR - and determine how best to integrate them together (first) and how to integrate social media into them (second). Sadly, I do not see this happen often, largely because of the departmental silos pharma cultures tend to foster.

Just like offline and online marketing, everything works better when it is integrated.

I would love to see the pharma PR and Marketing teams step out of their comfort-zone-silos and work together. With the right leadership, I am sure it can be done.

So is social media a marketing or PR function? I think it can be both.

What do you think?