Social Media Teams: Different on the Agency Side than Internal

One of the things I've been saying a lot lately is that over the next couple years, we can expect to see corporations adding dedicated internal social media teams. Does this sound like a statement of the obvious? Then maybe the corollary is more interesting: I think agencies should do the opposite.

I've seen a similar pattern in a dozen or more corporations in the past year: Responsibility for social media falls to the person or people who get interested and raise their hands. They come from PR, customer service, marketing--and sometimes just out of the woodwork. Good!

In other words, responsibility for social media tends to happen in an ad hoc way--and I actually suspect ad hoc is a perfect way to staff an emerging discipline. And staff it you must.

Social media requires a new combination of skill sets, traversing all the disciplines I just mentioned, but also including strong writing skills, a thick skin, and the social savvy to interact with customers through online media in ways that are on-brand, authentic, human, and bounded by corporate guidelines, policy, and politics. It's hard, but for the right people it's super fun.

For the corporate social media team, representing the brand is a full-time job, with its own discrete challenges and rewards. They need to focus on developing the skills and experience to do it well.

But on the agency side, the whole thing is different. Agencies need to bring to bear their full range of capabilities to support clients' social media efforts, and that includes all the "traditional" digital disciplines--at the agency where I work, we have a 10-person social media team that includes people from development, analytics, search, optimization, user experience, creative, and client services. It's a witchy brew. Our goal is to implode the whole idea of "social media" in the next 2 years.

So my message to agencies is: Adapt, or specialize yourself into an oblivion-vortex!

To be sure, social media specialty agencies (I have friends at several of them) provide a tremendously valuable service with their depth of expertise in social media. But my prediction is, as web marketing evolves further, the breadth of expertise brought to bear by "traditional digital" agencies will pose a grave threat to the specialists. They simply won't match digital agencies' capabilities in development, analytics, creative, usability, planning, and optimization.

Seven years ago, we were explaining the idea of online community. Three years ago, we were selling the importance of Web 2.0. Today, we're answering ubiquitous demand from clients that "social media" be included as a component in all our web work. Give it another 2 years and clients will see "web" and "social" as synonymous--data, content, service, identity, content objects, and relationships as integral to a holistic web strategy.

So on the agency side, there should ultimately be no such thing as a "Social Media Team," only a company made of web-savvy, passion-driven professionals who can support all aspects of corporate social media efforts--from concept through implementation.

The nuts and bolts, and rubber meeting the road, and the delivery of the service belong on the client side; and the vision, concept, and creative / conceptual infrastructure are where agencies can help. All in all, I have to admit, it ends up looking a lot like Mad Men, which my 90 year old Grandmother, true story, described as "the most realistic show yet about the '50's."

"It shows," she says, "exactly how we lived."

Comments

[Brook]

Cross-posting a conversation Ryan and I had about this post on Facebook...

Brook Ellingwood
Thought-provoking. I'd almost argue that no one inside a company should have "social media" in their title, as it takes the basic business practice of customer interaction and puts a newfangled label on it that just confuses the issue.

Companies could learn from Tracy Record at the West Seattle Blog, who bristles when she's called a "blogger." She correctly insists that she is a reporter whose reporting medium is a blog. The medium is just a tool, not the job duty. Companies need customer interaction people, some of whom happen to do their work using social media.
Tue at 8:56am

Ryan Turner
Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that. "Social media," as you're suggesting, isn't' a label that's actually descriptive of the function--it's probably more like "customer relationships," "online brand presence," etc. The challenge is that it's hard to avoid dropping the function into a traditional silo--a mistake that instantly removes a portion of the online medium's potential benefit.
Tue at 10:30am

Brook Ellingwood
Silos are a big problem. People think "media" belongs in some sort of department: Marketing, Online, maybe IT. But it doesn't. The revolution we're going through is one in which media has become essential to every aspect of doing business. If you aren't using it for marketing, you're using it for internal communication, research, competitive analysis, personnel management, or whatever.

There shouldn't be anything special about someone using some form of media to do their jobs, because everyone uses media to do their jobs. They just don't think of it that way. In both a McLuhanist and a real sense, all companies are media companies.

Unfortunately, changes like this don't get completed in a generation, much less a few years. The silo approach comes from business teachings based on how Alfred Sloan organized General Motors, even though it hasn't worked well for GM since about 1970. But effecting organizational change is a huge undertaking. It's easier to bypass it and hire agencies.
Tue at 10:58am

[Ryan]

Thanks for cross-poting this, Brook.