I'm enjoying Steve Woods's post today on Digital Body Language, on the ways Marketing departments can and should be "doing" social media. I want to take a deeper dive on a few of Steve's points, because they speak to my own experience as a Marketing Manager, and they conveniently tie in with our recent new white paper, How to Create a Content Strategy for B2B Nurturing Campaigns.

Steve describes the reasons that the Marketing people and the Social Media people are, well, separate people in most organizations: in short, because Marketing thinks in terms of lightning-strike campaigns, and Social Media requires a slow steady drip of content originated from subject-matter experts. My own experience, because of the very things Steve describes, is that Marketing as we know it and Social Media require two entirely different personalities.

• Crusaders: The term "marketing campaign," not coincidentally, ties it to major efforts of politics and war. The most successful marketing campaigns I've been involved with were led by charismatic project leaders. They were kicked-off at the beginning, and celebrated with champagne at the end. At their best, they were more than campaigns, they were crusades. They even had names.
• Shepherds: Managing social media requires constant watchfulness, vigilance, and even the herding of subject-matter experts and the content they produce. If I may mix metaphors, the notions of "herding cats" and "time to make the doughnuts" apply here. There might be a kick-off to a social media campaign, but there is no cause for champagne if they end (die).

Despite this stark difference in personalities, the Crusaders and the Shepherds can get more done when they come together, as Steve's recommendations suggest:

• Crusaders like to launch ads. Advertise the content the Shepherds are rolling out.
• Shepherds create a steady stream of content. Launch Crusades for that content, too.
• Engage the subject-matter experts that the Shephers have herded; bring them into the Crusades, too.
• Use the search budget not just to herd traffic to the blog, but to crusade for the marketing campaigns as well. (This one might seem obvious, but I suspect that the divide between Shepherds and Crusaders prevents it from happening as much as it should.)

At the end of the day, the Crusaders (for all their swagger) can take an important lesson from the Shepherds, and this lesson is discussed in the white paper: it's really all about the buyer, not the Crusade itself. Buyers don't care about the project, the kick-off, and all the hoopla around a marketing campaign. They have their own problems to solve--and they are solving them by having an ongoing conversation with the Shepherds.

So if Crusaders want to reach buyers (and aren't Crusaders the ones counting leads?) don't they need the Shepherds? I'm interested to hear stories of successful ways the two personalities come together.