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Put simply, Madison Avenue wasn't built to service brands in social media and, more importantly, Madison Avenue is not built to make money from the proper activation of social media for brands. The question is, can the system adapt, or will a new breed of agency be born in the vacuum of effective social media campaigns? Evolution or revolution? I have seen evidence of both.
Activating a brand in social media delivers a variety of benefits. Social media's conversational nature means that a campaign can deliver a lot more than simply message distribution. Social media can give a voice to a brand's customers (or those a brand would love to have as customers).
The effective social media agency will:
Be a long-term partner. There are no "campaigns." People will continue a conversation even though the calendar says you should be moving into a new campaign. Starting and stopping social media campaigns is guaranteed to waste resources and have very poor ROI. All the effort goes into building the social media conversation, and the positive ROI is really achieved once all you have to do maintain the conversation (which requires a lot fewer resources). For this reason, agencies effective in social media will look at multi-year engagements; rather than start and stop social media campaigns, they will work to help direct the conversation to achieve a brand's goals. As Adam Broitman of Morpheus Media said on my panel: "you shouldn't think in terms of running a social media 'campaign,' but instead think in terms of making a social media 'commitment.'"
Provide product feedback. Your social media supporters are your customers as well. A social media campaign, therefore, will allow an effective agency to deliver very pointed feedback directly to a brand's product team.
Provide message feedback to creative. Stuart Elliott of The New York Times, one of the people I had the pleasure of sitting with over the past 10 days, made the observation that when television was first introduced, advertising was having people stand in front of a microphone reading off a script about a product (like radio). It dawned on the industry that this new medium meant that new methods of advertising were possible -- and that they should capitalize on TV's unique picture and motion qualities.
You can't predefine your creative in social media, because it is a conversation. To predefine your creative would be like entering a conversation with a script, and no matter what the other person says, continuing to stick to your script. You might as well be standing in front of a microphone reading a product description. What a brand's social media activation partner will do is to make sure that people's feedback is properly distributed to the creative teams so that they can iterate on the creative elements. For more on how this is developing, read Brain Morrissey's recent Adweek piece, "Shops Strive for a New Formula."
Achieve social media message distribution. Of course, the effective social media agency will be able to measure and enhance the amount of distribution, or people sharing and talking about your brand. Rather than simply buying the media, a social media agency will know the various levers it can pull to help distribution -- i.e., more creative assets, games, etc., to create involvement.
Measure the ROI of brand campaigns (both inside and outside of social media). Social media is made up of people who buy brands -- and who frequently talk about what they do and don't like. Thus there is the ability to measure the effectiveness not only of your online social media efforts, but all of your various marketing efforts. It's up to the right agency partner to pull this all together for a brand.
An agency's new role in social media will be to maintain a brand's presence and extract various benefits that a brand should receive from making a social media commitment. To do this will require redefining the media agency's role. It will be far more consultative. It will interface with more facets of a client's organization. Tapping into all the ways an effective social media agency can deliver value to marketers, will set apart this new breed of agency. The skills required to coordinate effective social media management will command the margins required to support Madison Avenue.
I see some shops moving in this direction. Do you? Who is the closest? If you are an agency or a brand that feels you are moving towards this type of relationship, tell us!
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I have been a consultant with Aristotle Interactive Marketing for over 2.5 years. They have been way ahead of the curve on reinventing the role of a the modern marketing firm, and they have been moving towards this "type of relationship" since before I joined them.
Here are a few links to a simple online sites that demonstrate Aristotle’s fundamental social networking approach.
http://www.elvis.com/ http://www.myspace.com/elvis http://www.youtube.com/user/ElvisPresleyCentral http://www.elvisinsiders.com http://www.elvis.com/newsletters/
This is just the “tip of the iceberg� of social networking tactics, but large organizations that are not utilizing existing free popular social networking systems today are wasting valuable opportunities.
Designing a successful Social Networking Marketing plan is half of the battle. Detailed enhanced reporting is the crucial step that separates traditional agencies from the leading agencies that are utilizing "New Media" in order to start playing by "New Rules." Traditional advertisers and old marketing techniques no longer provide adequate intelligence anymore. Reporting the results accurately and appropriately is the real key to success. Emotionally based “trust me� reporting has been replaced with results based “show me the money� reporting.
Today, a marketing professional can provide their board with comprehensive data that demonstrates the exact (minimum) ROI for a campaign or ongoing social networking project. For example, utilizing a unique landing page can generate trackable results for offline advertising methods that traditionally could not be adequately tracked (e.g. Billboard).
No matter how simple minded and non-technical your board of curmudgeons may be, once you remove the uncertainty of the results they can’t ignore obvious revenue produced from trackable sources.
Anyway - change is happening and change will continue to happen. Extinction of dinosaurs, machines, automobiles, computer, Internet, global warming...
Forget discussing who will make the shift and who not - focus on the shift and enjoy the ride.
www.globalnetworkelite.com
Axel
I do think it's going to be difficult for traditional agencies to "retrofit", but why should they? Says who?
It's so easy to agency-bash. What's needed right now is someone to understand what agencies are going through (be big enough to not hold their immense historial profit margins against them) and work together with them to help deliver social media engagement as it should be. That's what we do. We even have a program that was developed specifically for this purpose.
In as much as I would never want to turn my social media consulting firm into an ad agency, I can bet that ad agencies don't want to change who they are.
The traditionals need allies now, not stone-throwers.
The fact is, I just don't think the biggest of agencies will be the ones that deliver the best of solutions to their clients. It's likely going to have to be a shared space -- with the more focused agencies playing a larger role. And agencies that consider technology just as important as media, relationships as important as creative -- those will be the ones that win out.
Sure, I'm biased. But shouldn't I be?
For attribution's sake, the phrase "Marketing is a Commitment" is a Joseph Jaffe-ism.
Just thought i would throw it out there :)
One point i'd add is that we often say that social media may be technically relatively easy, but culturally quite difficult. It's for that reason we at Converseon have had great success with ours social media consulting practice which is specifically designed to help clients (mostly enterprise level) transform internally through governance, training, policy/ethics, issues, etc. We've come to the conclusion through many engagements that this type of consulting -- which obviously is not a core competence of most agencies -- is critically important to help these brands become successful in social media. It's not about a campaign but a change in mindset. Further, without this business transformation, very few agencies, no matter how creative, will be able to be successful in social media for these clients. Social media success has to come from the inside out. Cheers.
We also stress the most about how social media is seen by some agencies, as you said, as a "campaign" and leave the conversations dry when they are done pushing what isn't social media at all, but instead just another rendering of their ads they created. I comment on this in my last post about how you can't push your TV ads onto youTube and call it "social media" and you can't just take over myspace for a day and call that social media either. http://amandavegaconsulting.wordpress.com/
I'd say the we are simply visiting the same conversation with just a new deliverable/activity that us oldtimers in the industry have been battling for years. Interactive, whether it be a site, SEO, or social media, is still seen as the bastard child of marketing/advertising - less budget allocation, less thought, and a complete undervalue of how much more time, energy, and quite frankly intelligence it takes to manage these activities is truly sad.
On a good note, we do know of two agencies out there that are very aware of these challenges and are trying to answer the calling through partnering with those of us that DO know how to integrate...even if it's still like pulling teeth at times.
I can't wait for the day that the coin flips...and interactive controls the messaging, the buys, etc. and print/tv get 3% of budget instead of internet!
Having been a part of a large online community (CNN Interactive, when they had an online community that was huge) and also being a web geek (web developer/web master) I'd agree with you Martin that it's more about community and less about web savvy-ness. Good post.