Mediacom’s Nic Hodges: Forget snake oil – social media should be about insight
Mediacom’s head of innovation and technology has warned that agencies rushing to monetise social media may not find the goldmine they expect.
The comment from Nic Hodges came after Mediabrands – the parent company for Initiative and Universal McCann – said is to launch a social media division, which will probably be called Rally.
And it also follows renewed debate about where in the communications mix brands’ social media should be led from.
“What gets lost in this debate about who’s posting on a Facebook page and replying to tweets, is the immense amount of insight social media can offer a brand.”
Saying that clients want the “snake oil” taken out of social, he added: “Almost everyone overlooks this value that social monitoring brings to the overall marketing picture. And I now watch with even more interest on how specialist social media agencies (or divisions within agencies, as UM announced today) plan on selling and monetising their services. Because the bulk of real value that a social offering brings to clients actually lies outside social media, so having a business dedicated to just social doesn’t seem like the goldmine many still believe it to be.”
The topic of the what type of agency should lead social media was also debated at the last Mumbrella Question Time.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Agreed Nic.
One brand doing such, and well, is Supre on Facebook. Every post is a design poll, and if they’re smart (and i’m sure they are) they use those insights to design the next season’s range http://www.facebook.com/supre
(no commercial interests involved, just admiration)
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worth noting they don’t do their Facebook Page in-house :/
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Social Media is still snake oil. No matter how you cut the snake.
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I agree. Unfortunately most social media is the 2010 equivalent of the belly flop competition. Invite people to some silly event and hope they tweet about it or send us your silly video and win. I can’t see the value of either to most brands.
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most Social Media is the marketing equivalent of mugging – expensive and bad for the head
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just wondering how will all the social media companies look at monitoring actual conversations as well; i’m pretty sure that face to face conversations about products etc would be the main form of social media
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