Posted on June 19, 2009
The Top Value Propositions of a Social Media Agency
BY JASON CORMIER
"Of people who identify themselves as social media marketers, 65.5% have never posted an update on Twitter" ~ Source: Sysomos Blog, June 2009.
I've been witnessing a dichotomy: Many marketing professionals are unaware social media agencies even exist, while at the same time, emerging hordes are on their way to creating them. Whether you're a social media "expert" looking to build an agency, or part of a company trying to understand why you might need one - this post should offer some insight.
At Room 214 we consider three areas of focus as seen in the diagram above: Analysts, Engineers and Creatives. Competency with respect to communications and the actual execution of work takes place in and across each of the three, ultimately enabling our value as a social media agency.
Each of the three focus areas have their own value propositions, and like a tri-pod, the whole operation is ineffective if one of the legs is too weak to support its part of the load.
1. Being Analysts: One of the beauties of Internet-based campaigns is the ability to track and measure what people do. With traditional web analytics meeting with new conversational analytics, the data can be overwhelming. Social media agencies have the expertise in sifting through the data to interpret insights leading to actions.
Due to the explosion of social media, there has been an emergence of social media monitoring and business intelligence tools for benchmarking, competitive analysis and gaining insights around certain topics that can be tracked in blogs, forums, Twitter posts and mainstream media.
The question becomes: Are the tools and data valuable? Yes. Do busy marketing or service support professionals have time to stay on top of them to the extent of actually impacting their business? Often not.
Top 5 Value Propositions from Social Media Analysts:
- Identification of trends, and insights into thought leadership
- Objective evaluations of tools, strategies and tactics
- Understanding and establishing best practices
- Research, benchmarking and measurement
- Filtering out the unwanted noise and capturing actionable data
2. Being Engineers: This is a key differentiator for our agency, in particular - even to the extent of adopting "social media engineers" as our tagline. Why? Because in our experience, a high level of expertise around technical platforms and infrastructure is a leading contributor to quickly making and keeping companies competitive.
Consider Facebook as a case and point: In the context of "engineering," there are three technology environments in Facebook that need consideration: Application development, Facebook Connect, and the functionality of general pages. Each of these areas has its own set of rules. The documentation is arguably limited, and as @DominicDiMarco put it - "the target seems to be constantly moving."
You may have great ideas - but the ability to execute and leverage relevant assets is often delayed and overly expensive due to a lack of technical (engineering) expertise.
Top 5 Value Propositions from Social Media Engineers:
- Knowledge of when to build vs. when to buy
- Ability to uniquely integrate, build and implement technology
- Insight to how solutions scale or how they are limited
- Innovation needed to improve upon accepted functionalities
- Customization of tools, applications and social platforms
3. Being Creatives: One thing I've noticed about "agency" vs. "contractor" status is the expectation around coming up with great ideas. Effectively implementing and supporting social media campaigns is critical to the success of any agency in this industry, but conceptualizing and communicating (internally or externally) great ideas requires a combination of skill and inspiration.
Expecting clients to conceptualize along with you without effective presentation aids, creative samples and proofs of concept can be an uphill battle. The ability to articulate, justify and demonstrate an idea from inception - then efficiently create the spaces by which it may grow and materialize is a practice in and of itself.
Top 5 Value Propositions from Social Media Creatives:
- Frameworks for brainstorming and conceptualization
- Development of visual samples or proofs of concept
- Collaborative processes to improve upon original concepts
- Holistic approaches to leveraging existing assets, advertising and PR
- Relevance around usability and effective models of engagement
It's easy to conclude that leading social media agencies must wear many hats - analysts, engineers and creatives. And being successful while maintaining a competitive edge requires a constant fitting of all three hats.
Where do you believe most agencies are strong or lacking? Are there aspects of the stated value propositions you would like to elaborate on from your own experience?
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Posted on November 14, 2008
The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media
BY JAMES CLARK
The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media: Summary
Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride. Yuck - the power of the word is evident in just looking at this infamous list.
The forces of good and evil are universal principles both online and offline. We all come into the real world (and the virtual one) as innocent babes. But once we arrive, our actions can bring us glory or shame.
In the world of social media, are you going to be a force for good? Or are you going to turn to the dark side - ruining your chances and infuriating those who cross your path?
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Posted on June 18, 2008
3 Reasons Top Brands Are Absent From Online Sponsorship
BY JAMES CLARK
I won't make you read the entire article for the 3 Reasons. Here they are:
- Agencies providing online advertising for top brands have no clue how to target online influencers
- Online advertising skill sets are vastly different from traditional MSM advertising
- Ad agencies lack understanding of the social web, and still see online advertising as display or pay per click only
Point 1: Using Influencer ID Tools Will Deliver The Audience Targets
Peter Whoriskey of the WaPo had a great post, Brought to You by .... Anyone? on how major brands are slow to move their sponsorship budgets to the web. In the article there were some great quotes that struck me:
Penry Price, Google's vice president of North American advertising sales, noted that while it is relatively easy to do demographic targeting in other media, it is more difficult to get precise information about online audiences for a given Web site. Consider, for example, an advertiser trying to reach young women interested in fashion.
"We know they're online, and they may be online more than they are watching TV or reading magazines, but there's no easy way to find them right now," Price said. The process of adapting to online media is "a fundamental challenge for the entire advertising industry."
Okay, Penry, Google VP of ad sales for NA, is right in regards to audiences for a given website, but the fact is the technology does exist today to target young women in fashion. Penry's quote reinforces the point that ad agencies have no clue how to target online advertising to influencers. They are still stuck in the MSM mindset that the site owner will provide the audience stats. There are other means at getting at this data. It takes work, but it is doable.
Coming from the word of mouth marketing and reputation management field in online marketing, we are often shocked at how few online advertising strategies focus on influencer targeting. By leveraging subject matter influencer identifcation tools such as Collective Intellect and Umbria, we actually can narrow ad targets to those sites, blogs and forums where young women interested in fashion visit.
But, again, it's not just the fact of finding those blogs and running banner advertising and sponsorships. It's about creating content that will put your company right in front of those niche audiences.
New analysis tools are there to dive even further into creating deeply targeted campaigns that connect the common threads of your audience. What does this mean? It means that a company just doesn't target fashion blogs. What they need to do is find the common "tribal" thread that runs through that entire target audience of women and fashion.
So imagine the analysis about young women interested in fashion also tells you that these individuals have a high affinity for social causes, discussions on urban travel destinations and a love for Coldplay.
NOW YOU HAVE A CAMPAIGN PLATFORM, not a just a target demographic to push your advertising to.
With this kind of research and understanding of the audience, big advertisers can truly connect through the "passion threads" of their target consumer. By connecting on a deeper, more meaningful level big brands will see greater acceptance, success and visibility online.
What Does A "Passion Thread" Campaign Look Like?
Sticking to the young women and fashion target, imagine a campaign idea that promotes user generated content involvement spearheaded by a fashion icon, donates a certain dollar amount to a major social cause for every UGC upload and awards a grand prize of an all expense trip for four to New York City to see Coldplay live in concert.
So now the targets and messaging go beyond the fashion blogs and sites. You have a common passion thread in multiple niche markets (social causes, music) that gives you the ability to run sponsorship on sites outside of the fashion world and influence and connect with other passionate users.
"If you are responsible for a brand that has been around for 50 years, you clearly are more cautious," said Kelly Twohig, who manages digital investment for Starcom, a media agency. "You have less license to innovate."
I think what Kelly is really saying in regards to less license to innovate is that you just can't take uncalculated risks. So by doing the influencer research upfront and presenting the data about the passion threads, and building the campaign and online media buying targets to tie those passions together, one can signifcantly reduce the risk and increase the probability for success. That's what the client is looking for.
Point 2: New Skill Sets Needed
Another issue is the skill sets required in online advertising. It's not the same game as traditional main stream advertising. There needs to be integration with the interactive team, development of a community manager role, definition of an online conversion, split testing mechanisms in place to make adjustments on the fly, online tracking and sentiment analysis.
I've heard the horror stories from large branding agencies that dived into online advertising only to find out they struggle to understand how to bring all of the necessary tracking, split testing and data and sentiment analysis together to define what would make the campaign a success or not.
For one thing, the largest chunk of money spent for online ads is in search advertising, those little text ads that run beside search results. These ads do not directly benefit companies putting information online. Instead, the money from search advertising is reaped by the search engines -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- that run them.
Listen, PPC search advertising is pretty easy. Yeah there's a science to it and it takes time and attention, but the goal of any brand advertising is to increase awareness and positive sentiment about a brand. So by default keyword PPC advertising is just one of many tools, but it stil dominates the majority of the budget.
Point 3: Embracing the Social Web. Beyond Banner and PPC Advertising
In the WaPo article, Rob Wrubel, chief executive of the online ad company that works for University of Phoenix, the nation's leading buyer of online sponsorship states that he:
...wants to encourage faculty members to have blogs so that when a person searches on a given subject, the results might lead them to the University of Phoenix. He speculates that the company could produce reality-TV "webisodes" involving people going back to school -- a way to find and engage the target audience.
Bingo. Rob has the vision for what is next and what will drive immersion for online branding. I've been saying this for a while, that the most effective online branding tool for companies would be to have their employees actively engaged and involved in social media.
The employee base is the most valuable and underutilized tool in the marketing shed. The more the employees get involved in the medium the more connections there are to spread the word about the organization or campaign. Not to mention the more insights the employees can deliver to the marketing team. I've posted my position about companies embracing employees engaging in social media on the Endless Wormhole blog.
The next wave is about understanding the common threads of your audience and creating content that is relevant and important to them. Brands need to start thinking of themselves as content publishers and looking at ways to increase there social web footprints through employee participation in social media sites, blogs, podcasts, online customer support, events, etc. It's all there, waiting for the taking.
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Understanding the 'Digg Podcast' section
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Almost 2 months ago, for their 42nd (re)design and feature roll out, Kevin Rose announced on the Digg blog about a new feature called "Podcasts." Here is what he said:
Podcasting
Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don't forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.
The Podcasts Section: what does it offer?
After we all had some time to play around with this section and get a feel for its popularity it is time to get down and dirty and figure out how to use it to promote your podcast. Instead of following the traditional "newest items first" scheme used in every other section, the digg team decided to sort podcasts by lifetime diggs. The basic idea is that each podcast is represented in order from highest diggs to lowest with the image, title and short description of each podcast as well as the good old Digg This button. Those curious enough to dig deeper have noticed that once you are on an individual podcast page, Digg proudly allows everyone to vote for individual shows within a podcast. While the diggs you get for individual shows do not reflect on the grand total for your show, they seem to play a significant role in the "Upcoming Podcasts" section featured on the main podcasting page.
