It seems like every time I meet with an agency, they bring along their social media experts. I’m not exactly sure what makes someone a social media expert. Perhaps it is someone who knows how to amass a lot of Facebook friends or how to put a lot of torque into their Twitter wrench.
But today I would like to discuss what I think it should be — specifically, what agencies can and should be doing with social media.
I’m not a huge fan of throwing dictionary-type definitions out there to try and build a case. But Wikipedia has a very rich definition of social media that reaches beyond how most people, including the experts, are using the term.
“Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content.”
Social media boils down to the marriage of two main concepts — content and conversation. Without content, conversation is mere networking. Without conversation, content is dead. It goes nowhere.
Many so-called social media experts are stuck on the conversational aspect. Heavy on the social, the first priority of this approach is to engage. From engagement follows sharing and then, finally — if ever — the creation of content.
This let’s-talk-first approach amounts to good customer service. Consider Zappos’ Twitter page. It’s a great platform for engagement and interaction. Customers can get their voices heard and their needs met. Zappos gives an impression of transparency that reaches nearly a million people. Certainly value is there. But there could be so much more.
The right way to do social media
The typical approach is backwards. Creating content needs to come first. This is where your value offering is. This is the foundation for engagement. Because at the end of the day, what your customers want to be engaging with is your content.
From content creation follows sharing and then engagement. In the formative years of social media, this was easily overlooked, in many cases, because content already existed. Musicians have found great success on social media platforms because their focus is on content creation. Comedy, same thing. Audiences share and engage with the content first. Conversions grow out of this.
To be successful, when agencies enter their clients into this free-for-all, they need to emphasize quality content. But to determine what constitutes quality, you need to take into account the high level of engagement offered by the web.
Ad agencies have traditionally built content as a way of building brand awareness. Great. We all love a smart ad. But customers today have an active desire to engage deeper and aren’t satisfied with less.
Look at the recent Bing ads. They take a very traditional ad approach:
Consumers are much smarter than this. You can’t just talk at them. And you can’t support your ads with only high-level talking head videos of product managers speaking product-ese — it’s a foreign language.
You need to offer practical, specific information that informs your audience about the product. And it shouldn’t be boring.
Ad agencies have such a wealth of content and content creators. Hire the agencies who are leveraging these assets properly in the social media realm. Don’t hire agencies who lack the vision to think more expansively about content and content distribution.
The situation for PR agencies is not entirely different. They just have different types of assets. Their greatest asset is the Rolodex.
Valuable connections are what most social media strategists are trying to build as they fall into the black hole of engagement. A PR agency already has great connections.
Great connections = a valuable audience. So why are so many agencies starting Facebook fan pages or Tweeting about press releases they’ve written? Do you read press releases? I didn’t think so.
The better PR agencies are creating valuable content and sharing it through social media channels with their already quality audiences. These audiences are then engaging with the content. This builds relationships, which leads to conversions.
When you are face to face with a social media expert from an agency, ask them what they are creating. Too many get sucked into engagement without having any engaging content.
Hire agencies who use their assets to create content that will engage your audience in a meaningful way. Build real relationships, don’t just acquire followers.
Sound off, social media experts! Is the wikipedia definition for social media accurate? How are you engaging with your clients’ audiences? Aside from customer support, can engagement without content pay dividends?
Brett Virmalo -
As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.
Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.
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Excellent article. Very informative. Thanks Brett.
Chris,
Glad your reading our blog.
Thanks for commenting!
- drew
Wonderful article! Loved it… agree with it… tweeted it.
Mark,
Thanks for tweeting it. Really glad you liked the article.
- Drew
Here, here. Well said and by far the most overlooked aspect of social media. I was a twitter conference a few months back and content was not brought up once. Amazing.
Here is why I think agencies will struggle with content. For the last 20 years, content has been a high stakes game. A network media buy can run into the millions, a large scale direct mail campaign can also run into the millions. Add the clutter we face as consumers with message after message stuffed in our faces and you end up with the need to create stuff that breaks through. High stakes. And with high stakes comes high budgets. What you will hear from agencies is that to do a 30 second spot right you need a $200K British planner that zeros in on the ultra important insight into the target market, add $60K for ethnographic research, you need a 5 person creative team, production budgets might include a celebrity director. There might even be a celebrity voice over or even a celebrity in the commercial and before you know it the “campaign” over six months is $5 to $10 million.
This is the agency business model. What is not the agency business model is to create short, interesting, cross medium (video, applications, blog posts, promotions, user generated etc.) content. They can’t make money on it based upon how they are staffed.
What it will require is a new bread of agencies that start from scratch. You guys are one of them. My company is another. We need more clients to give up the drug of big bang budgets and shift some of that budget into social media specific content creation. Phew! Off my soap box now.
Wow, Greg! Great comment.
You’re absolutely right. However, I don’t necessarily think our clients should stop spending money on big advertising budgets and big media pushes in the traditional sense. There is still a place for that.
I just think that consumers want more than that. Mass media is great at building awareness – however – an awareness campaign builds enthusiasm and intrigue in the customer’s mind. In order to satiate their desire for context there must be valuable content backing up and supporting their campaign.
That’s where agencies like ours and yours fit in. Anyway, thanks again for commenting. It’s nice to be engaged with people like you.
Agree that they should not stop spending money on the big advertising budgets. It is just a matter of allocating some of that money to properly fund social media efforts; both the resources required for conversations and the content required to add value to specific communities. Too many companies assign a low level resource to get on Facebook and Twitter and they then either send out Press releases, RT stuff, or mention boring company specific things. We are finding that most adjust this approach after a short period of time because fans and followers do not materialize magically.
Well put, Greg. The traditional broadcast marketing methods like PR and advertising are slow, expensive, and frequently produce one-size-fits-all results – particularly for brands without massive marketing budgets.
The best agencies get it and are making (or have made) the shift, but the big-brand big-budget campaigns are still the lifeblood for most.
I’m a big Ogilvy fan, and I wonder if the agency universe he helped create can heed his advice: “Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation is our death knell.” These days that “change” needs to occur not just in a glacial philosophical way, but daily, by analyzing and adjusting content, distribution, and promotion strategies. Big budgets are fine, but those dollars need to be spent differently, and long lead times just don’t cut it anymore.
Thanks for your insight!
Best article on social media I’ve ever read. The wikipedia def’n is superb. Off to share your content and then engage in some discussion about it…Thanks!
Julie,
What a wonderful comment! We’re flattered and so happy you took the time to tell us.
Thanks so much! Let us know how your conversations go!
Thanks,
Drew
Though I wish you had an easy sharing plugin…
A Ha! We recently turned off our easy Share It plugin. You’re the first to ask for it back! (Very limited and unscientific study… but perhaps we should put it back.) It used to be very rarely used.
Thanks for the suggestion!
We saw the same situation 20 years when ad agencies decided it was worthwhile to get into the direct marketing business.
They believed that they could apply the same branding creative approaches to direct response. But when they couldn’t produce the numbers, they decided to develop separate direct marketing departments and hire direct response professionals.
That’s probably what will happen here too.
Social media will become a separate department and eventually there will be a pool of experienced social media people who can offer this service effectively on a fee basis.
And most likely, it will be highly industry-specific because the only way to create meaningful content is to understand that industry. And I mean really understand that industry – much more so than is needed to create an ad or direct mail piece.
Great content. I am often taken back by a well-designed web site with absolutely ‘no fresh content,’ and how little effort it would take to improve this. The expense of 30-second ad ego bursts is staggering. Learn to be nimble and quick.
Great post and great comments. Maybe it’s time for a content agency… anyone doing that yet?
Do you think agencies will need to begin adapting traditional marketing campaigns to support social media strategies?
By the way… Props to all for resisting the urge to say “content is king.” Oh, darn, I just said it.
“Social media boils down to the marriage of two main concepts — content and conversation. Without content, conversation is mere networking. Without conversation, content is dead. It goes nowhere.”
Could not agree more. Brilliant article.
Greets,
Eelco
Seth – there are content agencies and tippingpointlabs is one of them. At my company we partner with all sorts of content companies, for example, we work with a company that has the following business model: For a one minute video shot anywhere in the US, produced from start to finish (script, shoot, edit, post) they charge less than $5K. If travel is more than 30 minutes outside a major US city than add travel time. Brilliant model. It allows companies to go grab good quality video anywhere in the US and then post it all over the web for people to interact with. Instead of one, thirty second spot that costs $150K to produce you get 30, one minute videos targeted at micro audiences and used in social media to engage the relevant people and build up trust, equity, authority…
The times are changing. Agencies need to keep up and clients need to help drive the change.
Drew, great insight. I am meeting tomorrow with a client that wants ‘to be on the web’. I am going to sit down and help him create worthwhile content instead. Then, I will help him share. There is value in sharing ideas and concepts in this type of forum. Thank you
I love how well you have articulated this. For businesses that want to use social media tools to get their message to consumers, it starts by knowing WHAT your goals are and WHO you want to reach. Once that’s clearly defined, the next step is developing content that meets the needs of your targeted niche market. Then, and only then, can you really begin to engage with your target market, and provide value.
I absolutely love the definition above about conversation AND content, and hadn’t heard it stated quite like that, although it’s the strategy I use through my own social media consulting. Nice to have the definition to go along with it.
Thanks for the fantastic post!
Cheers,
Jennifer Fong
Jennifer,
Thanks so much for your compliments. The wikipedia definition is great and I’ve been refering to it a lot lately in meetings with clients and partners. Thanks again for participating!
:)
- Andrew
Love, love, love this! Have been trying to convey a similar message within the nonprofit marketing community. Will be quoting this often: “Social media boils down to the marriage of two main concepts — content and conversation. Without content, conversation is mere networking. Without conversation, content is dead. It goes nowhere.”
Wow! We’ve been holding meetings this week to help define our business as we move ahead, so we asked the question “what is it we do”? We finally got to the point earlier this afternoon that ‘we make content’ Its what we do and we do it well and when it comes to New Media we’ve been doing it for a long time (first podcasts Aug ’04, First VidCasts May’05)
Now having read this blog post you have clearly defined our direction and helped us focus on our core strengths which is; we make stuff and we love making that stuff!
I’ve linked to your post from our blog… http://blog.tandemvoicebooth.com/
catch you soon Dave d
Dave, a lot of marketers, including the team here at Tippingpoint, went though a similar discovery process. Those of us who have thought about our work critically instead of just believing own own hype have realized that our greatest successes are all about content. We’ve been content creators for as long as we can remember whether we realized it or not at the time.
Regardless of where you look – traditional advertisers, SEO experts (what is SEO other than a strategic analysis of your content?), social networking, PR, or interactive – honest, high-quality, relevant content is an integral part of big marketing wins.
Great advice: know what you want to say before you invite people to hear you talk. Learn what you do best before you get on stage to do it!
Thanks so much, this is great stuff for the non-profit world, too. :-) Good tools for crystalizing our team’s vision and pulling volunteers closer.
Kelly
http://www.BlackRiverActionTeam.org
Great article and fantastic discussion. I find it staggering how many organisations haven’t yet put 2 and 2 together to realise the immense potential of micro targetted technology fed marketing initiatives. What better way to create true intimacy with customers and establish yourself as a go to person for valuable content, knowledge and leadership. This is a treuly exciting field with a beautifully unpredictable future.
Thanks to all for the discussion. BTW I found this blog via the blog mentioned above from Dave at Tandem Voice Booth. Great to have like minds feeding like minds.
Nigel,
Thanks so much for the wonderful comment! Appreciate you commenting and engaging in the discussion. I am originally from South Africa, so it’s nice to see people from around the world hearing our message!
Have a great day!
- Andrew
Have I told you lately that I love you? :) I’ve been spreading this article ’round and ’round. Very much agree with the perspective here. (Discovered you through David Meerman Scott, my hero)
Wow, Dave!
That’s the most love-filled comment we’ve ever received! Brett’s a talented guy and this article has been widely read. You’re a part of our success.
Did we ever tell you we love you back?
We also are big fans of David Meerman Scott. So glad you’re reading his stuff too!
Thanks again for the love!
- drew
Social media is absolutly the content generation engine of today. Encouraging content generation is the ultimate in customer engagement, but generating and creating content for the sake of the socialization is only part of customer engagement. The reality is that while broadcast media/advertising is slow and costly it does create a connection for the consumer to the brand. The realy trick is creating vehicles that generate social content that links the social and emotional connect a brand generates through its broadcast media strategies. Then its all about measurement….analytics is the critical link for all channel coordination.