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Posted on November 19, 2009
Choosing the Right Agency for Your Social Media - Notes from Day 1 at WOMMA
BY JASON CORMIER
As WOMMA 2009 kicked off today, I wanted to share some notes from the last session I found extremely interesting. As one who runs a social media agency, I am of course completely captivated by a session dedicated to giving insight as to what big brands are thinking when choosing to work with agencies in this space. 
The panel discussion included three individuals with an incredible amount of online and offline marketing experience. Each is a recognized leader within their own organization, and was kind enough to share some candid thoughts regarding their opinions on working with agencies. The background and highlights from each participant's discussion is as follows:
Steve Knox, CEO, Procter & Gamble Tremor: When I first met members from the Tremor team last year at WOMMA, I was surprised to hear that Procter & Gamble was already aggressively working with an agency to engage in WOM and social initiatives. I then learned Tremor was actually P&G's internal agency, working exclusively to support the brand(s).
Over time, Tremor has developed a community of about half a million moms through its Vocalpoint platform, and now successfully leverages the data, learnings and continued engagement to help brands outside of its own. Pretty impressive. The following are some of the things Steve had to say in consideration of working with potential partner agencies:
- If there is zero unique IP that a potential partner agency brings to the table, then anything they can provide is essentially a commodity.
- A successful agency is able to demonstrate that they care about the brand, and have a real understanding of its core equity.
- I don't want to talk to agencies overly focused on digital and tactics. Agencies need to demonstrate they get how offline conversations are going to be activated.
David Witt, Manager, Brand Public Relations, General Mills: David brought a different angle to the conversation, along with a level of humility and humor I think most in the audience recognized quickly. Here are some of the items I noted from his participation:
- From an agency, David is looking primarily for the emergence of creativity and execution
- The first focus should be on customer loyalty, then word of mouth and brand advocacy
- Ideas are power, and are of greatest value when they sustain engagement over the long haul.
- For brands to be social, they must realize it is about giving (example: General Mills just launched tablespoon.com, featuring over 25,000 recipes for consumers to engage with, ratings, coupons, etc.)
Christine Morrison, Social Media Marketing Manager, Intuit: I have followed Christine on Twitter almost since she began her most recent marketing position at Intuit. She has lead award winning efforts (including a Gold WOMMY Award today) for Intuit, and continues to demonstrate what success with social media looks like. Here are the highlights I outlined around her input:
- We look at the hows and whats of social media - and are interested in social marketing assets that are user generated and can be used in conjunction with advertising assets.
- We like agencies that are ahead, out in front, trying new things and have thought through why they are trying them.
- I like to ask, "do you know something I don't know?"
The main theme I pulled from each of the panelists viewpoints is the value they place in people who get the big picture. Social media and word of mouth marketing are a component of a larger marketing mix. These kinds of professionals (and brands) are past the point of "buy in" when it comes to social media. The more relevant questions pertain to how it social media most effectively fits and benefits their customers and business goals.
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Posted on September 28, 2009
How You Know it's Time to Hire a Designer
BY JASON CORMIER
After 5 years in business, Room 214 is finally ready to hire a full time interactive designer. Ever loving the "punch list" - here is my take on how you know the time is right:
- All your subs are too busy to start anything within 2-3 weeks.
- This is my favorite: Your best subs are thinking they'll leverage the design work they've done for you to start a new social media agency
- The few people you have inhouse that can actually do some design don't have time to do any design.
- Your developers are complaining "there is nobody to design this."
- Your account managers are asking "who should we give this to design?"
- Each new project signed or in the pipeline seems to have associated design work
- Your list of design-related work is growing
- You are unafraid of a designer running out of things to do (this especially holds true if you get the right one - i.e. one who enjoys a little HTML/CSS front end web development)
- You realize your own brand benefits as somebody is dedicated to visually nurturing it (this should result in better brand representation in presentations, proposals, case studies, articles, print materials, icons, web properties, etc.)
- You understand good people will grow the value of your company, pushing beyond the scope of any given job description.
Feel free to submit comments regarding things you think I should add. I'll be happy to update this list. Please also refer yourself / all potential applicants you may know of for the J-O-B to http://room214.com/jobs
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Posted on September 11, 2009
Job of The (Near) Future: Social Media Administrator
BY JASON CORMIER
David Meerman Scott had a great extension to Jim Stewart's post on the role of a Social Media Administrator today, actually offering a first cut of a Social Media Admin's job description. My abbreviated version of his more detailed job description is as follows:
- Knowledgeable of social media tools, techniques and philosophies
- Maintenance and consistency for company accounts on social media sites
- Evaluation, guidance and implementation of social media analysis and monitoring tools
- Maintenance and distribution of social media guidelines
- List maintenance and applicable display of work related personal blogs of employees
I'm sure this description will be updated as comments continue streaming in on David's blog. As I commented to this post, Jeremiah Owyang began talking quite a bit about the need for a Social Media Strategist in early 08' - as well as the need for a Community Manager to be the online face of the company.
I think the SM Admin role David defines bleeds into both of those roles - but one of the greatest values in my mind relates to the ongoing research and evaluation ultimately required to stay "fully knowledgeable on the tools."
One of the sustained demands on Room214 (our social media agency), is staying on top of the tools - and monitoring tools are only a subset of social media related applications we must pay attention to.
When you consider other emerging technologies like social CRM solutions, it is easy to conclude the evaluation and implementation of those kinds of items will likely be far more demanding than monitoring tools. I'd say the area of evaluation alone could justify the hiring of a Social Media Administrator. Obviously, there are other highly relevant duties, as listed, that further build the case.
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Posted on August 3, 2009
Room 214 Agency Profit Sharing
BY JASON CORMIER
This blog post is written to Room 214's most valuable resources - its people. Since my recent trend in blog posting has been to provide insight at the agency level, I'm posting it here for others who might be interested in reading as well.
As many of you know, we have worked to keep a very free and open culture here. One of the ways that manifests is in Room 214 being a flat organization. That means letting natural talent and leadership emerge without forcing programmatic job descriptions and titles. As James likes to say, "job titles are for your next job."
With respect to the success generated from these kinds of practices, sharing profits regularly with employees has been the intention since forming the company in 2004. Our decision to do this (every 90 days) is about three things: driving performance, recognizing the individuals' work that helps makes us profitable, and the act of giving.
So I'll get to it: Each of you who were eligible to receive profit sharing for Q2 should have seen it in your last check. Furthermore, your quarterly profit sharing for the 3rd quarter is tied to the following actions:
1. Innovate: Your first objective is to pick any one of our current clients for the purpose of focusing on what we could be doing better for them within the next 75 days. Consider things like case studies, new applications, methodologies, best practices, creative concepts, etc.
2. Execute: Your second objective is to actually implement your idea(s). Keep in mind this is by no means a "team-me" effort. Expectations may include required buy-in from the client, in addition to coordinated brainstorming and review with your peers.
3. Share: Once you have implemented your idea, you will write a blog post about what you did. What was implemented? What were your thoughts around measuring success? Has it benefitted the client? If not yet, then when? What were the results? What was learned?
Potential Limitations:
a.) Some of your ideas may require additional budgeting from the client. File those for later - and determine what can be done with existing budgets. Proposed out-of-pocket expenses will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
b.) We are moving at the speed of social media here. That means it may not make sense to do a deep dive into application development. You know who to talk to on our team if you do... just keep in mind they should be busier than you, and October 15 is your deadline to do your blog post.
c.) Client confidentiality should be an obvious consideration. Feel free to check with me or James if you are hesitant about what can or can't be said in your blog post. If you choose to use the client's name in your post, save it as a draft to be reviewed prior to posting.
I know we didn't think of everything, so feel free to post your questions as comments to this post, and I will respond in the same. Thanks for your awesome contribution to the team, and good hunting!
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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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