Social Media Marketing: The Interdisciplinary Discipline

There is bit of a conundrum when it comes to social media and promotion/marketing/strategy...whatever you want to call it (for now). On the one hand you have marketers and PR developing outreach and promotional programs based on old mentalities of "media is media" and that social media is just one more new medium.

I would argue that its not. Media is NOT all the same old media. Obviously. But more and more I see web strategy/social media programs being stratafied into PR mentalities, marketing methodologies, and inside-the-box-even-though-we-think-its-outside-the-box approaches.

Now this is more rant than prescriptive to be sure, but where its all going is consolidation: product development (interactive asset creation, web development), outreach (earned media, word of mouth), online marketing/advertising (paid media, SEM), community development (publishing/content) ...all living under one roof. There are too many layers and multidimensionality to the internet and to social media itself that it seems incomplete and fractional to keep the disciplines separate.

I foresee a time when social media programs are not the domain of PR or marketing-- but rather the domain of a new hybrid, multidisciplinary agency (which many are already forming, but seemingly out of the creative side of things ie: "interactive agencies") with all elements working in concert together.