The thing that I’ve seen consistently raise eyebrows when presenting marketing communications strategies to clients is the idea that social media programs do NOT have to live in their own isolated bubble.

“Wait, you mean the intelligence that I gather through my email campaign can be used in my PR/Facebook/Twitter/SEO programs (and visa versa)?!”

Yes.

Each medium does have its own challenges. You can’t treat people the same over email as you would over Facebook. It just doesn’t work. BUT, the information you gather from how your audience best responds to email campaigns to what keywords they search and have alerts set for to what types of blog posts they are most likely to “like” on your Facebook fan page has no boundaries (other than extrapolating to unrelated audiences).

Audience behavior intelligence is universal.

Don’t just collect all that information and stare at it. Use it! Understand the way that your audience behaves on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Linkedin/Google so that you can be exactly where they are, in ways that they want to see you while encouraging the behavior that you want them to express  (phone calls, link sharing, blog post publishing…).

For a lot of marketers, social media technology itself still seems pretty foreign, but let’s not forget that behind (most) of those Twitter accounts is still another human that has the same basic needs and desires as any other person.

Because when you break it all down, your Twitter followers aren’t all that different from your Facebook fans and your YouTube channel subscribers. They just choose different channels to engage with your brand and the content you produce.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackystuff/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

“Unified Marketing” was a term that had been stuck somewhere in the “theorosphere” for quite sometime. It was a concept and a practice we had been testing at CCA but I had never expressed it publicly until October 15, 2008.

I was a guest speaker on a panel discussion for Boston’s Social Media Club. The event was held in one of the luxury suites at Gillette Stadium with a terrific view of the field below. The topic for the evening was, “Corporate Responsibility in the Digital Age”. My colleagues on the panel included Peter Prodromou, Executive Vice President of Racepoint Group and Jay Welz, Assistant Director, Online Marketing, Jimmy Fund / Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

I must say that speaking to a SoMe savvy audience like the Social Media Club is a very different experience than presenting to any other audiences because everyone is so busy tweeting and writing blog posts on their laptops while you are talking. I soon realized that if people were looking at me, it is likely that I was not doing very well. If, however, I touched on something that was interesting to them, they would immediately look down at their mobile devices or the computer balancing on their laps and begin pecking a message to the world.

The first few times people stopped looking at me while I was saying something and suddenly started typing, I felt inclined to stop speaking and the sound of clicking keyboards filled the room. Realizing that I did not understand the protocol of this crowd, the moderator stepped in to ask me a follow up question, which let me know that it is okay for me to continue even if I was speaking to the top of everyone’s head.

One question posed to the panel was pertaining to the marketing mix and how should someone integrate social media together with traditional marketing tactics. As part of my answer, I spoke a little about the long standing need for measurement and a marketer’s tendency to put different tactics or channels into silos. This is often because marketers do not always know how to integrate their marketing effectively.

That’s when the tangent happened… and I said, “If you think about the word ‘integration’, regardless of what you are trying to integrate – whether it be people of differing persuasion, animals of varying size and appetite or, in this case, marketing tactics – ‘integrated marketing’ is quite difficult to execute successfully and nearly impossible to measure.” I continued saying, “At CCA, we are a web-centric marketing and advertising firm and rather than employ the ‘integrated marketing’ approach of yesteryear, we prefer to call it, ‘unified marketing’.”

At that moment, everyone started tweeting again and I realized that while we were still building our first case study for these principles at CCA, I had just introduced an important new philosophy which is now at the very center of every engagement with our clients.

While it has been especially quiet on the CCA blog during the last few months, I promise that this is a poor reflection of all the great client projects and creative brainstorms that have been flowing through these walls since our last post.

One of our main focuses over the past few months has been bringing our idea of “unified marketing” into reality. While many have already written volumes on the power of “integrated marketing” we believe that “unified marketing” is distinctly different, and deserving of its own place in business communications. Our aim is not simply to integrate the distinct PR, digital, advertising and marketing silos, but to release them from those silos all together.

Image from Flickr via Stuckincustoms

Each distinct discipline is driven by the same mission, the same overall purpose, the same passion to drive tangible results for our clients. Why not tear down the walls entirely and build a much more collaborative environment where everyone shares the same overall challenges and celebrates the same achievements?

What all of CCA has in common is that we are all positioned to create, distribute, analyze and measure content and place it in context for our audiences. It is simply the tools, anything from direct mail to blogger relations, that each one of us at CCA uses that differs.

But I know what you are thinking, the last thing that marketing needs is another buzzword. Trust me. I hear you. While we are already hard at work implementing the underlying principles behind unified marketing with our clients, most importantly, we are taking our own medicine and working on bringing together the creative advertising, PR, marketing and visual design minds of CCA together under this exact principle of unified marketing.

As we test our ideas, tweak our methods, learn what works and what doesn’t, we will be the first ones to know.  With that, we are really looking forward to sharing everything that we learn about what we believe is where marketing communications is headed in the very near future.