Social Media Relations

On the Net-Savvy Executive Blog there is a post about yet another up-and-coming role in the corporate world around Social Media Relations. I have heard people talk about blogger relations, but as this post points out, it should be much more broad to include all types of social media. I posted a while back about monitoring Wikipedia, which would fall in this category.

Nathan Gilliatt – the bogs owner says:
"I view social media relations (SMR) as an interdisciplinary specialty that spans marketing, technology, and Internet culture—three components of any successful strategy for engaging social media. It's probably an internal function, but where it belongs on the org chart and how big it should be is a question for individual companies to consider."

When company leadership eventually picks up on this the likely reaction might be to let the role fall to someone in IT but as one commenter (toby) pointed out, that it fall under marketing. I agree that social media isn't IT, but I don't think it's marketing either. I am not sure that many marketing departments could handle this role, at least today. Its technology, marketing, customer/public relations, customer services, and even R&D and Product management to some degree. The SMR will truly need to be able to bridge across many groups within an organization to be successful.