The Great Agency Digital and Social Collision

There’s a massive collision happening right now, a violent convergence of ideas and business models that’s changing the agency world almost overnight. And while it is one hell of a mess, it’s also a tremendous opportunity for those smart enough to recognize how agencies are being reshaped, and what that opens up.

That’s the gist of a presentation I gave to a couple student classes and groups at Elon University in Burlington, North Carolina two weeks ago. A short version is available on Slideshare, and is embedded immediately below.

The basic idea behind the collision is this: as the media world radically shifts thanks to the rise in digital and in particular the emergence of social media as a consumer-driven force, smart marketers are starting to shift their budgets to align with the new reality. Agencies of all stripes – from advertising and creative to PR, Media, Digital, DM and on – are in turn chasing those dollars.

As a result we find PR agencies with fully baked in-house digital shops, and formerly TV-heavy ad agencies with more full-time social media strategists than the largest digital group. We find a surge in acquisitions of speciality social media agencies, who find themselves by foresight or happy accident sitting square in the most lucrative sweet spot.

From a client-side marketer’s perspective, things are both wildly confusing – “why is my PR agency pitching their HTML5 expertise again?” – and loaded with choice, variety, and cost pressures working in their favor. They might put out an RFP for a social media campaign, and wind up with a final pitch group consisting of a niche social agency, a full-service (and large) digital agency, and a global PR agency’s digital group squaring off against their own current advertising agency-of-record.

What’s stressful for the agency new biz guys is heaven for the clients.

All this is radically reshaping the agency world, as traditional lines between agency specialities are blurring. For smart, digitally- and socially-savvy aspiring employees like those I met with at Elon, the opportunities this chaos creates are endless. The market for their skills has grown dramatically, and no longer are they locked into traditional career paths (“oh, she’s an ad creative”).

Their expertise, as it grows, has the potential to be attractive to every type of agency that’s chasing those digital and social client budgets. Which is to say, every agency that intends to survive past the next 5 years or so.

The next 12-24 months in my view will see this collision in the digital and social center accelerate, amplifying both the confusion and opportunity I mentioned above. Should be fun.

Social Fresh Charlotte Recap – On Social Media Agencies, Rubbermaid

It may be a week late, but here’s my entry into the “Social Fresh Charlotte Recap Post” ring. There are already a ton of great ones, collected in places like here and here to start.

What did I take away? First off, the conference was extremely well organized, so hats off to @jakrose and team for pulling it all together. Second, it’s clear from the energy, enthusiasm, and experiences of the attendees and presenters that the field of social media marketing is alive, thriving (despite the recession) and rapidly congealing into a focused marketing, communications, and support discipline. It was fun to be a part of all that.

I took notes on a bunch of good sessions, but for the sake of time I’ll share my thoughts on just two for now (self-servingly, one of those I was a part of):

SESSION: Bert Dumars (@bwdumars) – Building Social Media Across Multiple Departments

Bert is a walking case study in how large companies with multiple consumer brands are handling (successfully) the challenges of social media marketing. His talk reflected a lot of what I see in our own clients – a centralized set of social media domain experts working closely with the brand marketing leads to incorporate social into their existing marketing strategies. Bert shared a wealth of good examples and I ended up furiously taking notes to share back home.

What I took away:

• User-generated content (UGC) gets Rubbermaid the most mileage. Interested concepts like the Sharpie Doodle contest over on SharpieUncapped are great examples of how you can tap into the underlying passions of your existing customers to create a stronger, more personalized connection.
• Well-moderated communities thrive. Something of an intuitive finding that jives with what my own experience tells me, but nice to hear what Rubbermaid has gone through. Bert noted that as the Sharpie Facebook page grew past 1 million fans, the time needed to clean out spam and moderate the comments grew dramatically. However, the faster they cleaned out the junked, the faster they found their fan numbers grow. People appreciate a well-moderated discussion space.
• Social media marketing strategy is a component, not the be all end all. An oft repeated mantra, but one that people often forget. You need a marketing or brand strategy that incorporates social media, not the other way around.
• Rubbermaid is selectively using social media in the brands that make the most sense. Sharpie, definitely. Papermate or Uniball? Not so much. Despite all the attention, social media marketing just isn’t a great fit for many brands.

SESSION: Social Agencies, A New Model (Panel)

I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussing how agencies are adapting to and pitching social media, involving panelists from four agencies each with a different angle on social media: Steve Parker (@levelwing), James Andrews (@keyinfluencer), Ted Shelton (@tshelton) and myself (@kevinbriody).

Though I’ll have to rely on anyone who was in the audience to tell how it really went, I think from the perspective of a panelists the flow went pretty well and we covered quite a bit of ground, ranging from general thoughts and trends to specifics like pricing agency services (by project, not by the hour, was the unanimous opinion). Hats off to Steve Parker for stepping up at the last minute to moderate.

What I took away:

While I often describe my employer, Ignite Social Media, as a “pure” social media marketing agency, that distinction is a lot less clear to me now after talking with Steve, Ted, and James. The lines between social media marketing and direct, relationship, ad, PR, etc are blurring so fast that it seems we’re more accurately described as a marketing agency with a special focus on social media as a channel and toolset.

After all, we have an analytics team, a media buying team (from search to display to social), full creative and technical teams…all in addition to people doing strategy, blog outreach, new content, and so on. Ted rightly called me on the fact that while we focus on the social media domain space, our capabilities make us more of a full service marketing shop than I would previously thought. It’s definitely interesting to be involved in the evolution of a whole field of marketing…

I also want to call out Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) and Dave Thomas (@davidbthomas) both put out some great stuff. I wrote a bit about Amber’s presentation last week, nothing yet about Dave’s, something I hope to remedy soon (especially as he’s moving to a new role which I’m sure will put him solidly on the speaker circuit).

Beware the lone (social media) gunman

Inspired yet again by something Joe Jaffe said (ain’t podcasts fun?), here’s my thought for the day on social media and agencies:

Watch out for ad, PR, and marketing agencies who grab one senior guy with some practical social media experience, declare him their expert, and never bother to build the bench depth behind him.

In theory it’s nice and easy. Grab a “rock star” who has a kick ass blog and a few tens of thousands of Twitter followers, give him a fancy title, and trot him out as a proof point in front of clients to show “hey look! we get it!” The flaw in that concept is twofold, one tactical and one more strategic.

On the tactical side, that one senior guy can’t know everything about social media, and even if maybe he knows a metric ton-load, someone has still got to do the work. If there’s no depth of social media-savvy talent on the bench behind him, then what? Who’s going to drive the engagements, dig deep into Facebook, and show some love to the crazy-yet-awesome fans of your brand? It’s not him, so make sure you understand how strong the bench is first.

On the strategic side, the “lone gunman” approach should be flashing big red warning signs to any client committed to social media. First, it indicates that the agency isn’t all the serious about social and will likely apply it only skin deep to your campaigns and strategy, bolted on at the end like some third-rate aftermarket fender.

Second, it signals that your agency is willing to play “check off the capabilities” box with you, without truly developing the practice and skills needed to make your campaigns shine in social media. If they’re willing to trot out this old tactic, what else are they skimping on?

So be suitably wary when you see that “Chief Social Officer” tagging along on the next campaign pitch. You may just be looking at the entire social media team.