I’ve Finally Discovered The Root of All Evil: Organizational Silos

By Katie Paine / June 11, 2024

After nearly four decades of measuring communications results, I finally found the reason for most of my frustrations: No one talks to one another.

If you’ve followed me over the years, you’ve heard me rant about the evils of organizational silos, but I never had actual data on how bad the silo situation was. Turn out is is WAAAY worse than I thought. According to a depressing new report from Meltwater and Asana entitled “The State of Marketing Collaboration,” bipartisanship is as rare in marketing and communications as it is in Congress.

The basic premise of the report is that while everyone agrees that collaboration is a good thing, almost no one does it. Most don’t even know what their goals are. So no wonder everyone clings to vapid vanity metrics. Here are just a few juicy quotes. I encourage you to download the entire report here:

DREADFUL AND DIFFICULT

“Nearly one-third (29%) of social media marketers dread collaborating with their PR partners and 24% claim they are difficult to work with.”

AND THEN THERE’S THIS:
1 in 5 marketers say they dread having to collaborate with marketing operations teams, while 1 in 4 dread collaborating with marketing analytics teams

I’m sure that some of this comes as no surprise to my research and agency colleagues who regularly scream into their pillows when they hear the words “we don’t have access to that data.” I’m constantly having to explain that without the data we can’t build a dashboard.

But what is most depressing, but also explains a lot, is the lack of understanding and agreement on goals. We all have seen the consequences when marketing says one thing and PR/Social Media says another. Just ask the folks at Bud Light. That’s what happens when you don’t have clearly understood consistent goals and objectives.

What is astonishing is that this is 2024. I started The Delahaye Group in 1987, before social media, before websites, before automated anything. And yes, in those early years no one was sharing data either. But if you had told me that 37 years later there were still insurmountable silos between departments and/or that organizations still didn’t know know what their goals were, I would have thought you were daft. Sadly, I’d be wrong.