As you might know from my rant about firing your ad agency, I think the agency business model is broken and that social media is the nail in the coffin. In the interest of offering something positive, I’m going to explore a few of the issues and opportunities that social media offers agencies enlightened enough to understand that their world is irrevocably changed.

Build a dedicated social media team and business group

First, look outside of your existing team. It is very difficult to take the creative and media buying mindset of the agency culture and fit it into social media. You cannot ‘buy’ social media nor do you need ‘creative’ to get a message across. I recommend starting a new business with new employees to build a social media practice, a business that your agency refers clients to. There are many good reasons to take this approach:

• You avoid the problem of familiarity- your people are going to focus on what they are comfortable with and social interaction with customers is seldom their forte
• You need new people that are communicators because they are going to be facilitating a new form of customer service
• You do not need designers, copywriters, creative directors or media buyers. Nor do you need any silly agency titles like ‘brand ambassadors’.
• You can still use your agency infrastructure for billing, etc.
• Your social practice needs its own dedicated account management people. I know from experience that this is critical because they are selling an entirely different service and existing account people will have a hard time making the jump.
• Most important: You are a consulting practice. You’re going to get the clients’ social media campaign up and running, train the internal client staff and sell the senior management. You are not going to do it for them. This is a recipe for disaster that is probably the single most common mistake agencies make in social media.

The A side and B side of social media marketing

There are two sides of any social media marketing plan that your new business will be offering. The A side is the development of social media platforms that customers can interact with- company-owned social networks, blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter is a micro-blog), wikis, etc. These need to be set up, filled with relevant content and managed, ultimately by the client.

The B side is the engagement strategy. Engagement involves the monitoring of social media for keyword mentions related to the client brand and a modulated response to those conversations. It also involves regularly participating in targeted conversations on blogs and social networks associated with your clients’ market(s). This is done via commenting, responding to Tweets, adding value to social networks, etc.

The ultimate goals of these activities include:

• Reputation Management. Ensuring that client brands are viewed positively.
• Risk Management. Directly dealing with problems as soon as they emerge.
• Lead Generation. Always have an offer when you are engaging. It might be a white paper, a webinar, a free version, etc. You’re going to have a dedicated landing page with a shortened URL that you can use when commenting, tweeting, etc. If you don’t know what this means you better call me ASAP!

Lead Generation is the ultimate goal and it is measurable

A note about Lead Generation: Social media is the single best lead generation source we’ve ever seen. The ability to generate highly motivated and qualified leads is unique to social media and it is your selling proposition. This is the prime reason you need a separate unit to handle social media. Social media, as a marketing tool, is going to rapidly eclipse all of the activities your agency has been using in the past. This represents a threat to your existing employees and they will often respond by denying its effectiveness and getting defensive. This is because, in social media, everyone is held to measurable standards, based on results, for their work.

Unlike advertising, social media is highly measurable for ROI

There is the old saw about knowing that half of advertising works but not knowing which half. In social media we know what works. Everything is measurable to a great degree and you can build an ROI model. This is because social media is a vast, searchable, public database of information about your clients’ brands, reputations, products and services, a database uninfluenced by design. You cannot create it, manage it, mold it or eliminate it. You can take advantage of it in many ways. This is the basis of your social media practice.

Coming Soon: Part 2, the team structure.

Are you building a social media practice in your agency? We should talk. Contact me at martinedic.com