The Right Social Media Marketing Components for an Agency?

For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it means to have a Social Media Marketing line in a Strategy-focused Interactive agency. As Alisa Leonard-Hansen from iCrossing says, there’s technically no such thing as Social Media – it is just that the web is social. So where does this leave us:

1. Clients asking about “What to do with Social Media?”;
2. Clients rushing towards Social Media without understanding it or identifying the right metrics or modeling the ROI;
3. Continued media fragmentation while also continuing need to integrate across CRM, Social Media, Mobile, Search Marketing, Display, Online Video, Television, etc.

Very head spinning stuff. So I created a PowerPoint to take my first crack at this question. The answer will evolve as a process, since the Internet (and now Mobile) are moving at light speed.

Please check it out and let me know your feedback – where I’m right, wrong or whatever else.

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To be sure, Director of Marketing Services is an interesting and little used (but AAAA defined) title. Searching on LinkedIn, I’ve only encountered a handful of agencies that have someone with the same title (Hi “Didier Ackermans” of Aegis Media!). For e-storm, the title means that I’ll be involved in supporting, growing and integrating the various marketing service teams – PPC to Analytics to Social Media – at e-storm.

On the day-to-day level, this means I’ll be the common contact between all marketing services lines and in charge of helping them coordinate their activities with each other and the client services team. On the higher level, it means I’ll be thinking about the Customer Lifecycle a lot and see how e-storm can align the multi-channel customer with our clients’ multi-channel marketing activities.

From SocialRep (Click on image for link)

To be sure, e-storm has always sought to integrate our services (as do many of the other leading digital agencies). But as media fragments from TV, Print and Radio to dozens-upon-dozens of media platforms, there is a need to actively and constantly seek an “ever closer union” (to borrow an American political phrase) among all media channels and platforms.

And for this blog, it means a change in focus from being about “How Search and Social Media” interacts to always asking “How does this all fit together?”

So in my career and in this blog…Exciting changes all around!

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Last week, I decided to review the number of followers an official agency twitter account had versus some of their high-profile employees. For most Social Media Practitioners, the results I found were not surprising: More people followed the individual behind the Agency name, rather than the official Agency presence themselves.

But rather this data go to waste, I figure I share some of it with you…

A look at 360i, iCrossing, and SEOmoz and their high-profile team members.

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How Does This Apply To Your Company?

If you have a consumer facing company (B2C) or are focusing on Twitter for customer support (like ComcastCares), a strong twitter-based brand is needed on Twitter for instant recognizability by current/potential customers on Twitter. But, if you’re looking at thought leadership and building B2B connections, you need to have strong people communicating and engaging with your industry colleagues on Twitter.

There will be companies that will be reluctant to throw their weight on thought-leaders representing the brand versus an official brand twitter account. What happens when the person says something inappropriate? Do they have to clear everything with legal? What if the person leaves?

It is all a matter of priorities and appropriateness. If you want your agency to be seen as a thought leader and build relationships with others, this is best communicated through the brightest and energetic minds at your company. If your agency values consistency of a message over creative energy, then stick with your Twitter.com/CompanyX account.

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Hi Everyone,

For the duration of the week, I’ll be mostly blogging over at AdTechBlog.com to cover ad:tech San Francisco with Steve Hall and six other fine bloggers journalist.

Catch up on all the ad:tech fun over at:

1. http://AdTechBlog.com/
2. http://twitter.com/danielriveong
3. http://flickr.com/photos/emergencemedia

And if there are any exclusive ad:tech parties, please send an invite my way!

On another note, my employer, e-Storm International, is throwing an ad:tech party in Otis Wednesday night at 6pm. RSVP details over at the e-Storm Blog.

Cheers!

Daniel

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Ok, maybe not that well known Survivor show.

This coming Thursday, October 11, I will be a panelist (contestant) at HispanicNet’s “Digital Survivor Challenge”, where I, along with others, will be in a “Digital Survivor” contest to show start-ups and others how to easily set-up “a dynamic business and web presence on the cheap”. I’ll be flexing my Web 2.0 and Social Media that day.

The event will be located at Febwick and West LLP in Mountain View, 6:30 – 9:00. Be There!

Other Contestants:

• Alex Rowland, CEO, CozmoTV.com
• George Revutsky, CEO, ROI.works Search Marketing
• June Dershewitz, VP of Analytics, Semphonic
• Liliana Townsend, TierraNatal.com
• Luis Miguel Ochoa, Stanford University
• Marjorie Kase, President, BloggerReps.com
• Mauricio Perez, Director, Business Development, Ccube.com

HispanicNet Event Information

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Client-Agency Relationships: Now a Two-Way Street on Breaking Up

Via What’s Your Brand Mantra?, From the Wall Street Journal’s “Now, Often, the Agency Is the One Walking Away“:

Given a tough new-business climate, walking away from a client might seem counterintuitive. But some agencies are choosing to do just that, rather than sink more resources into accounts where it isn’t clear that either financial success or creative harmony is guaranteed.
…
All this back-and-forth is just another sign that the chummy advertising partnerships of yore are giving way to a more impersonal, market-driven environment. There is “relentless pressure on agencies and chief marketing officers to drive revenue. It’s killing our business. It destabilizes the relationship between agencies and clients,” says Matt Weiss, an executive vice president and chief growth officer at Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup.

While outside the scope of the WSJ article, two trends will continue heighten the “commodization” of client-agency relationships, resulting in the ever more common “break-ups” between major brand and agencies:

1. Increasingly ROI driven Marketing/Advertising decisions
2. Increasingly integrated approach to Marketing/Advertising

These two approach drives the pressure for both parties to have increasingly control over the marketing strategy, creative direction etc – driving up the potential for friction (while also collaboration) in the relationship.

Skip to the end to see how this also links to SEO campaigns.

1. ROI Means No Patience

In Karl Capek’s play “R.U.R.“, a character named Alquist laments that his stockholders refused to stop selling robots soldiers out of greed and profit, ominiously warning that “dividends are the ruin of mankind.” In the end, the robot soldiers revolt and destroy all of humanity.

Ok, so maybe the same is not at stake in a client-agency relationship, but there needs to be an appreciation that CMOs face great pressure from stakeholders to ensure that marketing is a money-making machine. The emphasis on ever more advanced logistics (from Dell to WalMart), integrating CRM systems with marketing data, and the promise tracking all online metrics makes the idea of complete ROI tracking seem misleadingly reality in some respects.

Planning and assessing based on complete ROI can be misleading in two ways:

1. Nothing can be tracked 100% and in the online world there can be high margins of error (20%) in just figuring out how many visitors came to a website. Just imagine the difficult of multi-channel analytics.
2. The most efficient ROI tracking system is still limited by Time. Compounding tracking issues, is understanding the lifecycle from repeated brand exposure to a purchase;it is increasingly difficult to figure out how to understand how long the ROI converstion process is. And remember that consumers diversifying their media consumption (XBox 360 to text messages via FaceBook), meaning more data that needs to be tracked.

With the false sense of security that ROI data can sometime give, a branding campaign maybe killed well before it can help drive sales. And even if given enough time, how can one prove that Brand Campaign X was what really helped drive Leading-Generation Campaign Y?

With stakes being so high, patience can wear thin while also pressuring the need for more control to ensure that the campaigns succeeds.

Which bring us to…
2. Pushing for More Integrated Campaign
The trends towards using integrated campaigns, uniting mobile marketing to online viral campaigns to television, means that the stakes get ever so higher on strategy, creative direction, and execution…basically everything.

Take this need for better control with the ROI pressures mentioned in #1, and you have the increasing chance of client-agency relationships becoming more contentious.

Closing Thoughts: Will this Happen to SEO as it turns in to Project Management?

Jennifer from What’s Your Mantra has some choice closing words:

If agencies don’t have senior staff that can speak C-level lingo and understand how to tie creative execution to business results, we’ll see more and more of agency/client relationships go sour. On the other hand, clients often fallaciously think that advertising is (or could be) a magic bullet. They no longer have the patience to stick with a campaign (or an agency) for the long haul. And lastly, most aren’t empowered to make the kind of customer-experience decisions that would actually move the revenue needle.

While I would of word things differently, she and I are basically on the same page.

Interestingly, SEO has some similar issues. SEO has been striviing to prove its worth with metrics and ROI tracking, but it has also expanded its roll to focus on “customer-experience decisions that would actually move the revenue needle”.

SEO folks are more embracing usability practices (e.g. shopping funnel optimization), branding considerations, and integration with PR as it focuses more and more on sales and conversions. See: “SEO as Website Positioning Strategy” and “SEO and Project Management“. Will it stay this way? Will things “sour” more among Client-SEO Firms relationships?

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