Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media recently wrote an interesting post titled Why Social Media Leadership Won’t Come from Public Relations Teams in response to a post by Edelman’s Steve Rubel. Tobin’s title alone put me into defense mode; it was very much a “thems fighting words” moment. I guess I’m so used to the PR industry taking hits that I braced myself before I even got the story, and after reading both posts, I’m certain that there’s a battle brewing, a custody battle over Social Media.

In his post, Rubel basically says that jobs and titles such as Social Media specialist will not exist the near future. As he sees it, Social Media will become the norm and there won’t really be a need for social media specialists; everyone will need to have the knowledge and skills necessary to work with social media.

Providing a little pushback, Tobin references Darwin’s “Great Tree of Life” and Al and Laura Ries 2004 book “The Origin of Brands” in his response. He takes on the idea of divergence and says: “As the world progresses, it gets more complicated, not less. And with every split in the tree branches, there is a new leadership opportunity. It’s almost never the brand leaders who cause the split and almost never the brand leaders who emerge as leaders in the new area.”

Good idea, definitely one I can agree with.

“Nature favors divergence, but entrenched leaders don’t diverge because they usually can’t. It’s against their business interests because divergence is disruptive.”

Another good idea, one I can agree with.

Everything’s going well and then I get hit with this: ” It would be unnatural for public relations firms to provide social media leadership. Just as we have SEO firms (which, one could argue, should’ve been done by PR firms if they were effective “catch all” public stewards of a brand), so shall we have social media agencies and social media specialists.”

Ok, now its officially a fight.

Tobin argues that the true insights, the true social media thought leadership, will come from those who focus solely on social media, playing with the tracking tools, the analytics tools and the widget tools to create new outcomes.

The thing is that PR firms (the really good ones) are actively recruiting people to do just that. The elite of the industry have realized that amazing connections can be made with several audiences using social media, and they have decided to take action. Some are just recruiting, but others have restructured their whole operation to gather all the “social media specialists” together under the PR umbrella.

• Do I think Social Media Specialists will be around in the near future? Yes

• Do I think the thought leadership will come from those who identify as Social Media Specialists? Yes

• Will all the thought leadership come from social media companies? No!

The core of the PR industry is full of late adopters, but once they decide to adopt, they go full force. At this point in time, the core of the industry has decided to make social media its own and the specialists aren’t having it. The battle is on!