The divide between public relations and marketing began long before the advent of social media. Alan Scott, chief marketing officer of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, is keenly aware of the friction between the two, having worked for five years on perfecting a more effective model in his group, which includes the PR function.
“Friction between PR and marketing comes from bad organizational alignment,” says Scott. “If PR and marketing do not report to a common place, there is much more of a chance that you’ll get the budget battles and infighting over who does what work.”
In the near future, as social media continues to transform the communications landscape, Scott believes PR and marketing will cease to exist as distinct entities, to be replaced by a new function around “the new conversational marketplace,” as he calls it.
Some aspects of Scott’s envisioned “new world”:
• Experts abound
• Hyper-segmentation changes marketing and advertising
• Marketing is fundamentally different from what it is now
• Opportunities exist for those who “get it”
• Competitive differentiation and advantage come from whether—and how—you participate in the conversational marketplace
Ultimately, says Scott, the old rules and models will need to be tossed.