Comments on: What is a Social Media Agency?

By: Sashank

Sashank — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:50:15 +0000

Nice post. I totally agree with your analysis of what a social media strategy company needs to do for clients.
I think measurement of several apparent and other metrics will hold the key to the social media strategy companies to succeed. A lot always gets said with regards to the benefit, very little focus is seen on ROI (both tangible and intangible).

By: Brad Schwarzenbach

Brad Schwarzenbach — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:35:34 +0000

Good article Nan. The concept of a social media agency is, indeed, poor to begin with. It’s unnecessarily narrow.
Social media are just one tool to use to build a comprehensive messaging strategy that – hopefully – is focused 100% on building relationships with influencers online.
Social media success, better search rankings, and a highly-trafficked blog are the result of these kinds of interactions.

By: Nan Dawkins

Nan Dawkins — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:44:16 +0000

Hi Catherine, I didn´t mean that companies shouldn´t use outside consultants to guide them in social media. We provide social media consulting to our clients. What I was trying to get across is that there are many agencies out there reinventing themselves as “social media agencies”. Some, as you point out, are search firms, but many are not. I´ve seen PR firms, developers and conventional agencies doing this.
At Serengeti, we do believe that companies should not outsource actual engagement (talking with customers and potential customers) to an outside vendor.

By: Catherine Sherwood

Catherine Sherwood — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:38:09 +0000

I do think that there is something called a social media “agency” or “consulting firm” that has value. I think that an outside organization – with presumably more experience in real social media – can do a comprehensive social media assessment of your customers, your brand presence, your partners and your competition. I also think that a consultant can help a company create a good strategy & implementation plan, and assist them in setting up their internal team (training, guidelines, escalation procedures, etc.) The example that you have given are of agencies that are using an SEO/SEM model and just relabeling it as social media. It is a world of buyer-beware and the problem is that most companies don’t truly understand what a social media strategy is so they are easily duped by these people who have done a quick-and-dirty re-invention of themselves

By: Nan Dawkins

Nan Dawkins — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:43:29 +0000

Interesting point — clients do need help determining what the objectives should be. Unfortunately, an agency is probably the last place you should look for an objective opionion about objectives. After all, the agency is trying to sell something; their ideas about the appropriate objectives will likely map pretty closely to the services they are trying to sell.

By: Samraat kakkar

Samraat kakkar — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:46:12 +0000

your perspective on what the social media agency should be is bang on target. the agency needs to bring not only a 360 degree perspective about digital media but also ability to integrate the main stream/offline communication & advertising online.

However I am not sure if the client can extract the above from an existing agency. The reason is that client itself finds it difficult to define the objective that it wants to achieve from socialmedia.