Every marketeer needs a medium.
Social media is a vast and growing landscape.
It is so difficult to know all of social media, the abyss being so wide it is hard to see the bottom. Because of this marketeers need their W.H. Russell, their man in the trenches, up close and interviewing the parties most concerned with a particular industry in a certain market. Russell, the Irish Times reporter, wrote the interviews and the war stories that inspired one of Tennyson’s greatest poems. The words of which used a suicide charge to market the chivalry and sentiment of English valour to middle-class Victorians with immense success.
Russell wrote good stories, accurate stories because he went where few reporters had thought to go. He went to the hospitals and he interviewed the men. He traveled to the battlefields and took accounts from the common soldiers as well as the officers. Russell was the best kind of social analyst, specialised in knowledge of his audience and expertise of his media. Russell was the medium of the war machine that was the British army, and as a result of his analysis, politicians, physicians, scientists, industry experts, and poets were able to alter the way that their markets perceived war, and even society.
The role of any successful analyst is expertise. It is that expertise that enables a marketeer to craft the campaigns that are most effective. Politicians and industry experts today have a lot of information and (hopefully) sufficient wisdom to know that information of any kind requires analysis to be meaningful, to be effective. This role is something still carried out in the trenches, but not the trenches of the geographical landscape today so much as the infinite highways and byways of the net. Markets voice their concerns and audiences acquire a character through their social media.
Knowing where to look, what to measure and who to believe is the realm of the social media analyst. The best analysis makes the best pitch possible, and the best pitch can turn a terrible mistake into a call to arms.