Hey Social Media Agencies — Alpo or Eukanuba? The Choice Is Yours.

It’s amazing that some companies out there don’t practice what they preach. Case in point: we had a video-streaming company as a client whose entire sales pitch to prospects centered around the power of using streaming video, especially live video, to strengthen their communications.

With that kind of pitch, you’d think their website included a ton of video and that they used live webcasts every day to reach their customers, right?  Well, no.

If you claim it, prove it

Even though they claimed that doing live webcasting with their product was as easy as flipping a switch, they barely had the time or internal resources to conduct more than one or two high-profile, high-quality webcasts a year.

Did their products work and do what they claimed?  Absolutely.  Did they prove it on a regular basis through frequent, engaging live video?  Not a chance.

The moral is simple, of course.  Whether you’re a social media agency or not, your company should be producing content that reflects your goals and supports your claims. Period.

Eat your own dog food

If you are an investment house and you want consumers to value the insight of your portfolio managers, blog about the economy.  If you’re an airline and you want to lure customers to exotic vacation spots, write about how exciting or relaxing your destinations are.  If you’re an audio post-production house, use podcasts to educate amateurs about things like gain, plug-ins, and waveforms.

And yes, if you’re a content marketing agency, like us, that urges companies to produce high-quality content on a frequent basis to engage customers and therefore grow revenue, you’d better be doing the same thing for yourself.

Weed out the posers

David Meerman Scott makes this same point in his recent blog post.  When you’re looking for a social media agency, he suggests you ask to see some examples of what they’ve been doing for themselves in the social media space. He says that it quickly separates the posers from the legitimate experts, and he’s right.

When we started urging clients to produce great content and give it away for free using content aggregators like YouTube and Scribd, we realized that we needed to prove the model with our own content.  Our content engine and editorial calendar were created as models for our clients (and anyone else who wants to try it on their own) to institute a system that works.

How we keep a healthy glow

The very blog you’re reading is, for the most part, our experiment. It is our live proving ground for all the social media concepts and strategies we endorse.

Sometimes we are accused of using it as a way to generate incoming leads and garner attention for our own expertise in the digital space, and of course that is partly true.  But it’s also a place where we can use our own content to make mistakes (or prove out theories) before our clients do. And that is even more valuable.

Takeaway

Show the effectiveness of your business by heeding your own counsel. Show it. Don’t just say it.

My questions to you

Are you eating your own dog food? Are you testing your strategies out on your own brand?

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.