on convincing CMOs to use new media

It's a cliche, but social media is the tsunami of public relations' and marketing's future. The problem is a lot of CEOs and CMOs have their backs to the beach. They assume if they can't see, it isn't happening. 

Or, they know they are about to get really wet, but they just don't want to deal with it. For anyone in public relations or marketing, this presents a conundrum. At least if you are savvy. Let's face it, with fewer and fewer people either reading newspapers or watching television, the best to reach them is social media

So why won't people in positions of authority embrace social media? Well, I think a lot of its generational. The average CEO is probably in his or her 50s and CMOs are not much younger. These are men and women who went to college at the very dawn of the computer age - pre-internet. These are not people who grew up googling their favorite bad.

I am over 50. I can still remember trundling over to the computer lab at Bradley University with my stack of punch cards. Each card has a pattern of holes punched out. The computer would "read" each card and print out a very simple page. Today, the average five-year-old could do better.

And woe to the person whose cards were out of order. That bollocksed everything up. Or, one of the holes was not punched through cleanly (think hanging chad). There were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of cards that had to be sorted through to find the bad one. It was not fun.

And the idea of the Internet was something out of science fiction. So although most executives have been working with PCs and the Net for at least 20 years, it is not stamped into their DNA. In their early careers, when many of them were most open to new ideas, they were not exposed to any of this.

  Although they probably wouldn't admit it, many of them probably still view the whole thing with suspicion. They often don't really understand the potential.

According to the Feb. 6, 2008 issue of Knowledge@Wharton: while the Internet provides a way to closely track behavior by measuring ad clicks or other online behavior, the reluctance to embrace the Internet may be due to uncertainty over how well it can shape broader messages.

So what to do? Design a campaign using the traditional elements of press releases, media events, interviews etc. with social media elements such as Facebook and Twitter. 

This way of doing things has been named straddle, by George Howard, an assistant professor of management at Loyola University in New Orleans. In his blog, 9GiantSteps, Howard details how "marketing today is a straddle between the offline world and the online world. Only those who straddle right will survive. Err too far online, you fail. Too far offline, you fail." 

Howard notes there are infinite possibilities for straddling, yet few companies are taking advantage of it. For instance, why wouldn't a restaurant use Twitter to send out its daily specials to its customer list? Why aren't retailers using Twitter to feature sale items? Why aren't B-to-B companies using Twitter or Facebook to troubleshoot problems?

Consumer companies could buy ad space to feature their on-line links. They could encourage customers to join a social media site to take advantage of specials. B-to-B companies could send out emails to their customers touting their on-line presence. It's not that hard.

It all comes back to that reluctance on the part of senior management to embrace a technology they don't understand. That's where savvy marketers enter the picture. It is our job to show clients just how to do it.