The Inconsistent Agency in Social Media
As more and more companies come to realize that Social Media will play an important role in their emerging marketing efforts, they often turn to outside agencies (PR, advertising, interactive marketing, SEO, etc.) to play appropriate roles in strategy and execution.
But as noted in my last post, the caliber of these service providers can be “spotty” to say the least.
Partly that is natural: Social Media is a new field with many best-practices that have yet to be captured, much less created or documented.
But, there are also firms who are either willing to cynically exploit client ignorance, or, are too lazy to learn the core principles of the blogosphere.
So now we’ve got Ignorant, Evil and/or Lazy agencies to choose from. But there is yet another type of agency to watch out for, and that’s the Inconsistent vendor.
The Inconsistent Agency is neither evil nor ignorant but has yet to make an agencywide commitment to understanding the new rules of marketing. The resulting knowledge gaps could unwittingly derail a client’s PR program.
The Inconsistent Agency has a handful of Social Media savvy practitioners, on whom the majority of the remaining staff rely for all-things-social. If the client wants to talk to their day-to-day team about blogging approaches, for example, the squad members immediately feel the need to defer that conversation to one of their in-house experts.
That’s not always a bad thing. When particularly complex issues come up for our own clients, for example, our senior staffers (including Doug Haslam, Robert Collins, and a number of other behind-the-scenes smarties) are frequently called on for advice.
For Inconsistent Agencies, the trouble occurs when the workaday account team cannot answer BASIC questions about Social Media.
For example, what if the client offhandedly asks their junior Account Executive, “What do you think about the idea of posting anonymous comments on relevant blogs, and then coming back later as someone-else, to point readers to our site? Is that a cool idea? Is that kosher?”
If Social Media is baked into the agency’s DNA, even that junior staffer knows instinctively that that is NOT COOL. And they won’t be shy about suggesting that the principle of authenticity is central to social media.
If you are a PR agency client, this might be a good test. Ask one of your agency team’s junior staffers the question above. But, don’t freak out if your junior rep “fails” the exam. As I noted above, this is a new field. If your agency has not claimed expertise, it’s not fair to ding ‘em for it. Yet.
UPDATE: On Twitter, in the comments, and in private emails, I’ve been dinged by “junior” staffers who suggest – with justification – that they are often the agency employees with the most & best credentials in Social Media. That is an absolutely fair point, especially as I think about SHIFTers like Amanda Gravel, Sandy Kalik, Marie Williams, our UnSpun bloggers, and many others, who are as expert in the field as anyone. Every good agency can claim similar stars.
My broader point was that a PR agency that professes Social Media credentials will fail if it relegates that expertise into pockets of excellence vs. making a broad commitment to training/education across all levels.
Continue reading here: Introducing: Press Release Grader
Was this article helpful?
