HR and Marketing Shake Hands and Decide to Merge in the Newly Social and Digital Media

The more I look the more I feel HR and Marketing will Merge in the Digital Social Media.

I first began looking to correlate HR and marketing a good 4 or 5 years back for a human resource management project during my BMS days. And while I suddenly realize it to be a long time, I also applaud my own vision back then.

Jokes apart, digital and social media in particular by powering people’s need for self expression are creating momentous changes in the way both brands as well as entire businesses function. And in the process a business and its brands cease to seem separate. Which then suggests that the partners of a brand (usually consumers) and partners of a business (usually employees) cease to seem separate as well.

This is the idea, and I must admit I see it echoing on various minds these days in some form or the other.

Going back a little into our high school science journals, I’d like to place some observations to validate this hypothesis if I can call it one. They are as follows, but prior to that like in the good old science journals some assumptions:

Let’s presume all humans are going to be socially connected through digital media. And for the sake of existing simplicity let us also assume they’re going to be connected using their blog, Twitter or Facebook.

The Observations are:

1. This means that the people which a company is going to hire will use any or all of the three platforms to say something related to their life and work. So they’re going to be talking about your company – in the days of yore it meant publicity (good or bad being a different question).
2. As brands begin to participate in conversations they will begin to build their community. The community which will include employees (present and future) and customers and consumers will eventually do the selling for you. Brand association 2.0 or better version in a jargony.
3. Your community is your brand, its members your brand vehicles I once typed somewhere. People will want to associate with your company based on the kind of people you associate with. This could be, by having them on your team or making them your consumer (forever).

Conclusion(s) -

Essentially we are moving in a direction where your business is the centre of a network that you connect:- vendor – customer – consumer – team. The ensuing circle of this network is your brand, it grows as your network grows. Unlike earlier when people associated with a brand, now the brand will be the association of people and a business. Seth Godin calls it the ‘tribe‘, I think.

What this also puts into perspective is that the lines dividing HR and marketing which was already dimming over the years, thanks to better human resource management practices will blur a lot more. They will cease to be a corporate brand, a consumer brand, there will be just one business, and its products will extend as different facets of the same brand. Apple and its product line in the new millennium is an example in this regard (of course Apple most often finds itself as an example in many things in today’s age).

Another small example of diminishing HR and marketing lines comes from web firm in Bath England – Carsonified. Carsonified essentially makes web apps, runs events on web design and development and runs a fairly successful blog, and has a quite a decent following online. Among many things that it does, it offers a four day work week, an iPhone and a Macbook to its team members, they call this the Carsonified Lifestyle. And if you see I am talking about that company here on WATBlog. Some of you might immediately become fans of this company by just reading the couple of lines above. The Carsonified lifestyle is nothing but their HR strategy and branding, but it has translated itself into the company’s brand and will also spill over on to any of the app or event that they do (and it does).

Another example is that of the Open Source clubs. There are legions of followers for Drupal, WordPress, etc. They contribute to the code, provide feedback, use it themselves, suggest it to others (sell), etc. While there would be a core team (often highly engaged initial users of the software), the larger team of these products are spread across connected by an invisible thread of the brand and the business. I use WordPress for my blogs, build WordPress enabled sites for my clients.

Who am I? A customer or an employee?

Both?

The lines between HR and marketing the way I see it is blurring to the point of extinction.