My business model for a social media agency

Brilliant Tim, I totally agree … because that’s almost exactly the set up we have.

Hughes PR is a ‘traditional PR’ agency that over the past year has added two ‘digital’ consultants who are also content producers, with years of SEO experience. Another key allegiance is with web and platform developers.

I think another two key areas are

An analytics team; developing insights and measurement strategies

And

A specialist events team

You’re smack on Tim with this one. I hate the term ‘public relations agency’ because people automatically assume that you’re just media relations and by that they mean ‘print media’. As PR agencies we don’t help our cause either sometimes.

Public relations is about communicating with audiences, and so many of them (agencies) miss the mark with this one. They generate absolute tosh that damages our reputation and industry.

Social media is a channel, a way to communicate with whichever audience a client wishes – hence why social media should lie predominantly within a PR realm. But we do need help, we need to SEO experts and we need the creatives too – they come up with some great ideas. At the end of the day, it’s about the result for a client, not which agency wants to have its share of the pie – of which there is far too much of that going on right now.

It’s a shame there’s so much dick-swinging egos between PR and advertising. Admittedly this is not always the case, but it’s sad to see it.

Great model Tim! I totally agree that PR should be the backbone for social media because of its emphasis on relationship building and two-way communication. But as you point out, we don’t have all the skills to produce great social media content, we need some partners.

So, where do we apply?

That’s a wonderful model for a Social Engagement agency. Talking with fans, creating content, building a community that self-moderates and generates it’s own content, and having a client that truly understands what’s going on.

The problem lies in the fact that very few clients would see positive and measurable business outcomes from such an agency. It would need an attitude from the very top that social will have a significant long term impact on the business, even if it can’t be measured.

And then you’d have to justify how expensive such a service would be. And it would be a lot more than traditional PR costs.

I think one of the most confusing things for anyone reading all these marketing bods rambling about social, is that everyone jumps to the ‘managing facebook pages and creating communities that love the brand’ opportunity. There’s a lot of other strategies that can leverage social media, ones that are far more relevant to a broader range of businesses and products, and ones that have measurable outcomes that actually have an impact on the business.

So Tim, you’ve got a great model for the PR section of your social agency, I can’t wait to see how you’ll build the other bits.

We feel strongly that the PR mindset is the right approach for brands when engaging via social and digital media. You’ve outlined some of the key strengths that PR brings to the table. To your list, I would add objectivity, authentic engagement, story telling and the ability to maintain a dialogue.

The Encoder PR approach recognises that the traditional PR agency needs to raise its game in a few key areas. We emphasise visual communication, research based strategy, deep audience insights and digital execution. Our strategy is to collaborate with third partiers to help us deliver these things to client and build our own internal skillset over time.

We will collaborate with third parties in a wide range of disciplines to give ourselves and our clients an edge.

I agree with Reevesy that the one skillset I would add to your list would be an analytics or planning team.

Nice post.

Part of any social media offering invariably boils down to how many Facebook fans/Twitter followers/YouTube subscribers the strategy will bring in. This is one of the key ROI measures for social media for any brand, just in the same way you can assign a ‘value’ or ‘worth’ to each newsletter subscriber.

To that end, there are some agencies out there using questionable tactics to garner large numbers of fans, or increase hits on a YouTube video. Of course, they are often of very little value to the brand if they’re brought in like this. The way the agency will bring these people in needs to be asked.

re Nic Hodges …. “The problem lies in the fact that very few clients would see positive and measurable business outcomes from such an agency …. “even if it can’t be measured.

Nic, speaking as a client I think you have the wrong pov here, it sounds like you are shifting the onus of proof to the client rather than the agency, which is perhaps not the smartest startegy if you are the service providor

As a client I would suggest that the best agencies will, as always, concentrate on proving measurable outcomes from social media strategies, be they positive or negative so that we can all learn and do better next time

Hey Tim, you forgot a pretty crucial component – analytics.

Just because a lot of relationship building is considered “soft”, that doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. If awareness is the primary goal of an activity, then establishing a baseline is crucial to enable benchmarking effectiveness.

One big problem with digital is because almost everything is measurable, we often forget to focus on the important things in our customer journey. Many campaigns now have Google Analytics installed but far fewer have Goals (let alone ecommerce) defined. This of course requires a pretty high level of trust with the client.

I absolutely agree that it’s about communicating in a way that builds relationships but if those relationships don’t turn into short, medium and long term sales – or you can’t accurately account for them – then good luck getting a budget.

Good post, Tim.

Many of these points are relevant for consumer media, too. Especially outlets dabbling with sponsored content.

Where you are absolutely on the money Tim, is the role of client education. We need to serve clients with access to quality information – rather than using their inexperience as a way to sell them more and more services.

The more you educate your client, the more you empower them to come back to you for what they KNOW they need. In the social media/pr channel, the client cannot assess its value to their business unless we take them on the long and complicated journey on how it works and how it should be measured. Too often agencies rely on their clients’ ignorance.

It is unrealistic (and I think un-authentic) for agencies to be the sole VOICE of a brand. Companies are best served with in-house social/media communications to engage directly with their customers and external specialists to teach them HOW and collaborate with them on developing strategy.

Great post Tim! When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of assembling your team, in the past year at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, I’ve found it’s great to have a mix of backgrounds – including not only people who come from PR, but also from digital marketing, interactive, and individuals who live and breathe social media and use social networks in their personal lives.

Case in point that we hired two people who reached out directly to us on Twitter. These skills mirror precisely how we have developed our global team since it was formed in 2006 by John Bell. The bottom line is that you need a variety of experience and skills on the team.

And your point about needing to be nimble content creators couldn’t be more spot on! Don’t get me started on infographics…

I’d put much more emphasis on content creation. Particularly with all the noise in the digital realm, who’s going to listen if you’ve got nothing meaningful to say?

No-one’s talking about media agencies in here anywhere – now I’m getting worried! Should there not be some allegiance between the social media/PR strategy and other ATL media? Should this just be an inter-agency relationship not an internal one?

What a great conversation.

I agree wholeheartedly with AnneMaree – we believe our clients should manage their own voice online. There’s no need for an agency bod to get in the way of that – our role is to provide strategic advice and, in most cases, training and education.

Brian – in recruiting our second digital consultant, we publicised the job opportunity almost exclusively on Twitter (apart from that, we also had the role listed on AdTown). The right person found us.

Funny – how many agencies clients used to talk about unique visitors, impressions and time spent and it was all about getting websavvy and building their web page that everyone would come to.

It’s no different with social media. Now everyone wants Facebook likes and Twitter followers.

It’s not about what the technology allows us to do, but what we should do for brands that matters. Social Media is just one small part of the total picture and should work in conjunction with everything else, not as a means to an end on its own. Indeed, the end may not even require this means at all.

In my experience, creative agencies are able to think more broadly about the bigger picture brand challenge and are better at providing wholistic thinking for brands without having to push their own individual barrows.

Some great points. I’d like to put out there that I’d say it’s still too early to put Social Media into a category. Certainly there are lots of relevance in terms of how brands engage with consumers that fit within a PR model. But, Brian’s point, we need to have a mix. Engagement with consumers is just one opportunity. How about making sure that Sales people are involved – social media as a sales channel and lead generator is a very real opportunity for alot of brands and services. And what about Product Development – making sure that your product managers are utilising the channel can lead to many benefit. Telstra – as Tim you showed last week – are very much engaging in a Customer Service model, that’s not about PR but solving customers problems. And what if you’re an Arts based organisation; I’ve seen examples of social media as a performance channel.

So I’d suggest that the ideal Agency is an intergrated service agency across mutliple models – or a client led amalgam of service providers.

I’d think a client would ask this – “How do I measure social media ROI against my other marketing campaigns (traditional media)” How do we marry social media strategy with clients’ existing campaigns?

On PR as the backbone of Social Media – I agree with you because PR practitioners know what language to use to reach out to target audience in the best possible way.

On that note also, social media need other components that would help back them up; eg. functionality / look and feel of their social media network page (who’s going to design the Twitter page to ensure it complements the brand?)

Kim,

IAB UK has developed a measurement framework which is very robust.
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/iaba.....140710.mxs

A great and important discussion!

I’m actually a little disappointed at the very narrow definition of Social Media Marketing, which many of us who’ve been involved in this space for a while actually call Social Influence Marketing (SIM). I also read, hear and see a very broad and fundamental misunderstanding of this tactic / discipline.

First of all there are many ‘use cases’ around social media:

– Social Media Marketing (which includes but is broader than just online reputation management & digital PR)
– Social Sales (Dell, IBM)
– Social Service & Support (Comcast, Dell, Telstra)
– Social Innovation (Crowdsourced R&D, product development – Dell, Starbucks, Ducati)
– Social Collaboration (Politics like Obama campaign, Enterprise stuff like Yammer / SharePoint / Lotus Connections in the enterprise)
– Social Customer Experience (end to end experiences)

Therefore, PR is not the backbone or owner of ‘Social Influence Marketing / Social Media Marketing’. None of the major organisations who are successful in this space like Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Comcast, Pepsi, Ford, Best Buy and hundreds of others pigeon hole SIM into PR. SIM is simply another integrated tactic in the arsenal of the 360 degree marketing mix.

The other problem I come across all too often is too many marketers, media and commentators just don’t understand that Social Networking is NOT Social Media Marketing. ie. simply creating a presence on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or creating a blog, without developing a strategy, without understanding the social behaviour of your audiences, without understanding which social technologies are appropriate for your audiences and without developing a strategy, does not constitute social media marketing.

The other problems are; marketers & agencies are hearing but not listening (good listening = monitoring and benchmarking which directly defines your strategy, tactics, KPI’s, engagement and messaging), simply having a checklist of social networks to be on, applying a broadcast monologue approach to messaging across social technologies, failing to engage properly and failing to commit. I said back in 2007 that “Social Media Marketing is a commitment, not a campaign”.

There is much research and many stories already outlining that the majority of organisations and agencies trying to execute social media marketing programs are failing – largely because they simply haven’t developed a strategy. By the way hope is not a strategy!

I also see lots of people from time to time comment about the Obama campaign but they are simply perpetuating the myth that Obama succeeded largely because of social media, this is simply not true. The Obama campaign succeeded because of email marketing first, mobile marketing second and social media marketing third but it was also strongly inspired, energised and supported by ATL (Above The Line) advertising. It is therefore a great example of a best practice, 360 degree marketing campaign which happened to use digital marketing (including social media marketing) in the most effective way to support the campaign goals and objectives. The team who led the Obama campaign has stated this fact on many occasions but it keeps getting lost in reporting.

It is critical to understand that Social technologies are not limited to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Social technologies are everything from blogs, forums, communities, product reviews & ratings, RSS, chat & WIKI’s, social media newsrooms, audio & video, social media press releases, social bookmarks and widgets, just to name a few. Choosing the appropriate social technology will depend on the social behaviour of your audience and your goals, objectives & strategy. There is no such thing as a mandatory reason to automatically establish social network outposts or accounts on every social network! If an agency presents you with this sort of checklist, run away!

Social influence marketing is about engagement and conversations and it is not just another opportunity to broadcast a monologue of messages. And yet so many marketers and agencies continually treat Twitter and Facebook as an RSS feed to simply broadcast more messages.

We’ve moved on from the era of the Conversational Marketplace pre 1949, through the era of Mass Marketing Advertising circa 1949 to 2000 and we are now in the current era of Conversational Marketing 2001+. But, it seems a lot of people cannot grasp the fundamental changes in consumer behaviour underlying these new rules and of course the associated opportunities and therefore they are spending far too much time focusing on the bright shiny objects, ie. Twitter, and not enough understanding of the insights, problems and opportunities and development of a strategy. If you don’t understand your target audience, where they are and how they use the social technologies then you will consistently fail.

This is the Social Influence Marketing framework I use and advocate:

1. Listen & benchmark – hearing is not listening and if you don’t at first benchmark your share of voice and that of your competitors, your sentiment, the volume of posts, volume of authors and volume of domains, map the influencer ecosystem and develop conversation maps, then you’ve got no insight to develop a strategy and importantly nothing to measure your efforts against.
2. People – understand the social technographic profile of your target audiences
3. Goals & Objectives – speaks for itself
4. Strategy – speaks for itself
5. Content Strategy – content is still king and it’s critical to invest in content, map out a content strategy across all the channels and create content suited to the technology, tools & platform and the social behaviour of your audiences.
6. Technology – choose appropriate technologies, tools, platforms & networks based upon the social behaviour and location of your audience.
7. Engagement – social media is not a passive medium and doesn’t follow traditional marketing rules – what are your engagement models, rules, workflow, roles & responsibilities and your resourcing plan.
8. Search & Social Media plan – meta data planning, coordination and optimisation are critical for discovery across earned & owned media.
9. Measurement – how will you monitor, measure and optimise activity, influence and behaviour and what insightful & actionable KPI’s will you use.

The art of storytelling and content is also crucial to Social Influence Marketing success. Generally, stories sell, facts and figures don’t and this is particularly true across digital marketing and social influence marketing. But this doesn’t mean simply creating one content artefact and distributing the same thing across all social networks or social technologies. Certain content artefacts work best on certain technologies and with certain audiences and different audiences use the technologies differently.

Lastly, influence is not about popularity – it is NOT about the number of followers a person has or the volume of their tweets or retweets or the number of their status updates or blog posts. True influence by its very nature is the power to influence another person’s behaviour, actions, sentiment, outcomes or opinion. Sadly way too many people are spending way too much time on trying to engage with the wrong people who are not really influencers and focusing on the wrong metrics. All you need to focus on is; Share of Voice, Sentiment, Post Volume, Author Volume, Domain Volume and then attribute a comparable value to the engagement and conversions from these sources.

This failure to really understand social influence marketing is definitely the single biggest lost opportunity across marketing today, particularly in Australia!

Well-written Tim, seems you’ve really struck a chord here!

Martin Walsh’s detailed comment about SIMs is very interesting, and something I’ll certainly take on board as a freelancing online media consultant.

As a freelancer, I find your model for an agency quite intriguing, and echo the comments of others suggesting a metric or analysis component be included.

Also, just wondering if the role of an online community builder fits in at all to your model? Is there room for a dedicated content creator?

Look forward to seeing further discussion…

Where’s the quality content, captivating stories? In the end you need to be able to support the core value proposition of the client and have the creative content that tells the stories. Sure – it needs to be tied to PR, but if it is to be integrated with advocacy, partners, campaigns… then you need to have all the PR agency skills esp strategy and then social media.

Wow, Martin Walsh, that’s quite a lengthy post. Just quickly: we need to be reminded of what ‘PR’ is. Public relations is not simply publicity. It is related to all facets of an organisation’s communications and can in fact have an interest in internal communications, customer service, sales, collaboration and so on. Where allowed, the best PR agencies (or in house PR managers) have an interest across all comms streams – that’s why social media fits in so well.

Tim, I like your thoughts (no surprise there being a PR bod) but I don’t think there will ever be a ‘right’ model.

The term social media covers such a huge realm as Martin and Mark have pointed out, I think its hard to have a one size fits all model. In fact, there’s a whole other area which is I don’t think has had a mention which is social recruiting and I’m not sure that sits with PR.

I also agree with Reevesy and Ian Lyons that analytics, measuring, reporting all need to be key.

Its important to have partnerships, allegiances or a “client led amalgam of service providers” as Mark has pointed out because each client is going to have totally different needs.

I think there’s a trend towards collaboration as this space is moving so fast, its impossible for anyone to be an expert across all the different areas all the time. The Carve model is interesting as it is literally a wiki-based business where specialists were brought in for different projects – I think we’ll see more of that in the future.

And Brian – I’d love to hear your thoughts on infographics one day 🙂

I’m so happy to hear a few people on here comment about analytics!

My view is that if your organisation hasn’t invested in a Digital / Online Analytics Lead role or substantially educating your team on digital analytics in this day and age then you will always struggle to measure, test, optimise, learn and determine what your ROI is.

I’ve spent most of my initial time in my current and two previous roles sorting out the digital analytics space first. Digital measurement also seems to me to be the most over engineered and yet most misunderstood area of digital marketing.

I thoroughly recommend attending the eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in Melbourne, Nov 16 & 17 2010. Agenda – http://www.searchmarketingexpo.....cs-agenda/ Jim Sterne founded this summit and it is highly regarded across Nth America and Europe but he’s only just brought it to Australia this year.

*Shameless plug, I’m speaking on day 1 and my session it titled “Creating a Structured Digital Marketing, Reporting, Optimisation & Testing Framework”. I will touch on Social Influence Marketing measurement and reporting during my session.

Martin Walsh’s comments are excellent. I think a social media agency is at best a short-term answer to an immature market.

Surely, social media is something which must permeate all sales, marketing and customer service activities. It should become part of each of those disciplines and be tightly integrated with all of the other tools and mediums used to achieve objectives.

Great discussion but no one has mentioned the integration of social and mobile. With the huge numbers of consumers connecting to their social networks as well as browsing and apps via mobile it also makes sense to include a mobile specialist/division in this structure – which then brings in location and direct response mechanisms such as mobile coupons, ticketing, commerce etc.

Mobile adds in the loyalty component. @Ian Lyons and @Martin Walsh are right of course by bringing in analytics. However, the strength of this approach is when campaigns are integrated with all channels that make sense, and with a CRM program. It still surprises me how many companies do not have a robust database, and therefore can’t track what their customers are doing, or can’t build a database.

Tim- you’ve more or less nailed it. great stuff

PR, in its purest sense is definitely the soul mate of social media. But so too is Direct Marketing.

Social media agencies need to be very flexible and resourceful.

The need to be quick off the mark when issues escalate and keep themselves busy when nothing happens. I guess PR companies are more used to this dynamic than most.

Give social media is such a multifaceted beast just thinking of the logistics would make my head hurt. Every role described above comes with its own set of complexities.

If were to set up a social media agency I would keep it simple and offer two services:

– Strategy, to point a client in the right direction
– Issue resolution, to help clients when things go wrong

For the latter, think of Mr. Wolf’s role in Pulp Fiction…

Tim’s post was good but much of what followed was typical self-important social media wankery. a pity.

Really good post and some really interesting comments.

In terms of skills needed in the ideal Social Media Agency, I would add:
– Strategist
– Monitoring team using best of breed tools
– Web Designers/Developers to create an appealing presence + develop interesting apps and widgets.

Based on this article and the many comments that followed as well as my own analysis I have compiled on my blog a list of ‘must haves’ for the ideal Social Media Agency: http://www.ideagitalmarketing......model.html

Thanks