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?