5 Tips for Finding the Best Social Media Marketing Experts

or Redux: Who Owns Social Media Inside Marcom?

This past week PRWeek talked about Volvo UK selecting their media company to handle social media marketing chores for the brand. This represents the complete destruction of the public relations 'business" as we know it - or so the article speculates. In short, this is crazy talk.

No one discipline 'owns' the broad world of social media marketing and communications. Trying to force that to be so is a waste of time and misses the real point of this tansformational expertise. So instead of trying to figure out which agency directory to shop in - PR, Ad, Direct, etc... - look for the experts doing the best work and with the best approach. Chances are you will find great partners and never really know which discipline they originally came from. 

5 Tips for Finding the Best Social Media Marketing Experts

1. From a brand perspective, figure out a way to break down your own internal barriers between old-diciplines: media, advertising, direct, communications, even customer service. Social media marketing is a bellwether of this type of integration as it does not live within anyone discipline. You don't have to re-engineer your marcom structure from the ground up. Creating a matrixed group fo social media experts from different disciplines to work together will help. And yes, someday, all marketing and communications pros will have some knowledge and capacity to work very effectively in digital and social media.

2. Look for Strategy, planning plus execution. It's not enough to deploy a tactic like a blogger outreach program or a cool conversation aggregator. You must know how the Social Web can work together - how a community cultivated around a Facebook brand page can be activated or enhanced by Twitter and using Facebook Connect to, well, connect with your owned web presence. Similarly, you can't be a great stategist without experience deploying programs and building relationships online. So much of social media insight is from learning while doing, not pontificating from academic knowledge. So much comes from things gone wrong. I could tell some stories about learning through mistakes but since our industry doesn't tolerate that type of open frankness, I will leave that for my direct conversations with other brand marketers.

3.Make sure that they have an enlightened view of (and capacity to 'work') SEO. Social media can have a profound effect on organic search results. We all know that. Everything we do in social media has a search goal. The real potential is driving third-party, positive mentions of your brand in the first two Google results pages. You cannot "game" those mentions. You get them by delivering some type of remarkable value to people who then choose to tweet, blog or comment to their social graph. You can be smart about your linking and incentive strategy. Anyhow, any social media marketing expert worth her salt will have an SEO strategy.

4. Make sure they plan to scale their program. This is where media agencies have an advantage. They start by purchasing media. They talk about scale everyday. they have a built-in measurement model that is outdated yet still accepted as a basis for big budget business decisions. No one wants to settle for a social media effort that garners 25 blog mentions. No matter how much you gussy-up the unique monthly views of those alpha-blogger, you have not achieved appreciable reach yet. You can acheive reach in a number of ways - operationalizing blogger outreach, creating content and influencer affiliate networks, and using content-based advertising smartly and strategically. This is where PR social media experts need to broaden their view of their jobs. Their job should be defined by the result they are after not simply the means to get there. (I don't think PR experts should say "not-my-job" when the talk of scale and buying strategic advertising comes up.

5. Choose someone with a measurement discipline that makes sense and is manageable. Even if you end up using a different model or simplify your measurement to simple KPIs, find a partner who always thinks in terms of impact and "performance measurement." There's more to this simple phrase than meets the eye. Social media marketing and comms must be optimized. That means you can't just launch a program and sit back to count the results. You need to be ready to modify your approach on the fly. Anyone who tells you this is a highly predictable dicipline is full of it. Perfoemance measurement allows to know how you are doing in real time and make adjustments.

Clearly there are other qualities to look for but these are really critical. And they cross expectations about what you would expect from anyone discipline. Have I just described my own team and offering? Of course. But I didn't do it to slef-promote. I genuinely believe these are the critical qulities to using social media well. That's why our group is a part of Ogilvy Interactive not just Ogilvy PR. We integrate social media with direct, CRM, marketing, communications, customer experience.

PR firms doing great digital work and with an expansive view of their discipline (see the PR Pro of the Future) don't need to worry about media shops eating their lunch. they just need to focus on great social media programs.          

Comments

[giles rhys jones]

Agencies need to apply the Digital Heart, Discipline Head rule. This applies to all digital channels/techniques - social, mobile, outdoor. i can brand build offline and through all these channels, just as i can do crm or activation. The social lines are blurred at the moment but it will follow most of the other digital developments and as it becomes accepted the discipline leads will come to the fore.

that would assume that all these agencies understand the need and investment required to deliver.

hmmm.

[Jared O'Toole]

Also make sure you understand what social media is all about first. You should have an idea of the direction you want to go and how social media is used. Don't just pass the task off to someone else with no idea what good or bad work is.