Last week Mobile Vikings announced the end of their Conversation Manager. Their message is very positive: “We are evolving from a Conversation Manager to a Conversation Company”. I have to admit, that I loved this sentence right away 
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Their announcement made me think: will a successful Conversation Manager become redundant after a while. Well, there are two sides of the story.
In a company where the client is really part of the company’s philosophy and the company culture is strong, the need for an operational Conversation Manager is limited. However, the reason why this company has such a position is because the top management lives the brand. In a company like Mobile Vikings, everybody is convinced that top customer service and transparency are crucial to become a true Conversation Company. In a company like Mobile Vikings, the Conversation Manager is probably the CEO. If I think about companies like Zappos, I guess the CEO is Conversation Manager as well. In the theory of American social media expert Jeremiah Owyang, these companies are called holistic companies. These companies don’t need a Conversation Manager, because they are a Conversation Company. Only 2% of the companies is in this situation.
Most other companies need a Conversation Manager who is responsible for the Conversation strategy and to facilitate other departments with the organizational change. The Conversation Manager is not necessarily responsible for the participation in the online conversation (it can be part of the job), but the role is more strategic than operational.
In 98% of the companies this role will always exist. There will always be a need to facilitate change about new media and new expectations of consumers.
I find the notion interesting that the conversational manager will/could become redundant when a company reached its conversational goals.
Let recap: The current conversational manager is a generalist whose role it is to introduce new ways of communicating into a company and gain traction. If this person is successful the company will reach its desired conversational status his or her services will no longer be needed… This is true.
However the need for conversational/social specialists will only increase given that the need for planning, delegation, execution and reporting will only increase. These are people that cover the basic areas needed for successful engagement including but not limited to: Strategic, PR, advertising, insights and analytics. Agree?
Hi Tom, I agree. There will always be a role for a Conversational expert. Maybe we should even take it a step further and turn things around. If the Conversation Manager is successful, you don’t need a marketing & PR manager anymore. That’s the ideal situation. At that point, everyone is marketeer, everybody is speaking in behalf of the company and everyone is part of the sales crew, facilitated by the Conversation Manager. But, let’s face reality: we’re not there yet.
I agree.. When an employee represents a unique facet of the company and is actively conversing with the outside world via their blog or twitter or whatever, there is no more need for marketing & pr. At least, if done correctly. This is the sort of thing what new breed companies such as tech start-ups have been hugely successful at. Now the rest needs to follow. #someday
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