Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

You might find some value in the white papers on www.marcomgeek.com. There are a number dealing with social media.

As for what you pay, that depends on the level of skill you require. You can pretty much find services that range from the ridiculously low to the ridiculously high. You general get what you pay or to a point.

Start by talking to the references that you get for your various consultants. Ask them about their business, why they did SMO, the results (ROI), and what they would've done differently.

I think it is hard for an outside firm to really execute a social media strategy effectively. Social Media is all about authenticity and trust and personal relationships, not just paying money for someone else to do something.

I would really encourage you to build social media into the structure of your company, brand and employees. If you have an outside firm doing a social media campaign for you, it will likely be seen as fake by your audience. Outside firms CAN advise and teach you. But to be good at social media, your own company needs to be the one in the conversation, not some hired guns.

You might take a small step yourself by setting up a business page on Facebook (for free), and you might enjoy these free marketing webinars including one on Social Media Marketing.

Hello

We do this for clients, so my answer is going to be biased in favor of using outside firms to do this (just wanted to put that right up front!) We find it to work very well, but as one of the other answers suggested - you are the real ambassadors for your brand so it is going to still take some effort from you, particularly in the set-up and strategy part.

The things that you can get them to do for you that would be most useful will depend on your goals, just like all things to do with marketing. Social media marketing strategies depend on what kind of brand and audience you are trying to reach - if you're Abercrombie and Fitch and you're what we refer to as a 'badge brand' (your customers want your label to be noticeable, like badges), you can set up a MySpace page and have people flock to it because they want to be associated with your brand, and to have your brand appear on their friends list in return. If you are a badge brand and want to appeal to a younger demographic, that's probably the easiest social media marketing group to work with - get your SMM consultant, who has workers in your target demo, to spend their time on the hottest and most popular networks just talking about your brand and being a participant.

However, if you're K-Mart, you have a different issue. Yes, you'd like to engage your customers and have interaction with them, and you have plenty of them, but you're not a brand that they will want to brag about like the Abercrombie and Fitch example. You'll have to get participation in things that they already do. For example, you could find a network or site that your target customers (let's say mothers who shop for a household, in the K-Mart example) already spend time on (iVillage or a local TV station website, for example) and become the badge of some relevant activity on that site. For example, if you want to talk about back to school clothes and you're K-Mart, you could sponsor the back to school planning pages on a local TV station website, and it can include a discussion group on where to find great deals and how to plan for the return to school, tips and tricks on ramping up (or down) the activity levels and bedtimes to prepare for school hours, a bookmark sharing tool for great websites with tools for back to school... You get the idea.

You could try to host this on your own site, but you're fighting with that brand issue, and it becomes a marketing site rather than a social site (although you would make use of your regular site to push traffic to this other site.) The other option would be to host a microsite (e.g. www.backtoschooltips.com) that supports it and you're the sponsor. If you have good vendor relationships you can probably get them involved as sponsors too, and that gives the site more flesh to build content around.

You could have the appropriate staff write entries for this site - the person who is responsible for planning the back to school displays talks about how they do their job and why they make the choices that they do, the person who buys back to school supplies does the same, interviews with vendors on what's cool this year. Your SMM firm will ghost-write these into real content that suits the style of the site, because most staff are not journalists (and you want this to take up as little time as possible so that they can do their real jobs!)

Whether you use an SMM firm for this will be partly dependent on how much work you think that there is involved in your project and whether or not you are able to do it in-house. If you're building a huge additional site and you have in-house designers and programmers who can hire appropriate staff for it, then the SMM firm will be more used for guidance. If you think that starting a little smaller would be easier, then you probably don't have a need for a full-time person so your SMM firm will be a money-saver. An SMM firm also bring perspective that you might not be able to find in-house. They bring a customer-centric view, and they also spend time on other projects which makes their opinions well-rounded and balanced to advise you on what's working around the whole web, not just in your area. You can use them to run the team, be the team, be a part of the team, just to strategize - it all depends so much on what choices you end up making in your SMM strategy.

The amount you pay will depend on what you expect to get out of it. If correct spelling, punctuation and grammar in your online activities are important to your brand, then you're going to pay more. If someone who thinks that a blog that contains more numbers than letters is perfectly acceptable is right on target with your brand (sell sk82u, anyone?) then you may be able to pay less for a younger person. If you want solid marketing advice, then a firm with a marketing background as well as a web and programming background is worth paying for. If you just want someone to implement what you decide, you can hire one of those firms with a loft full of interns and you can manage it yourself.

Social marketing is a lot like PR - it takes a subtle but very knowledgeable hand to make it look accidental, and that comes with experience and that comes at a higher price.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project.

If we can help you at all, feel free to contact us at [URL deleted by staff].

I agree with mvolpe

We are building in house our own SMO strategy and it is going fine but what we are learning is that the interactions are fast and furious and the pace of change is enormous.

There is no one formula that works, it is different for every brand and company because different users will be interested in your brand or product.

be flexible, have a very flexible technology team ready to add new techniques and technologies to your offer every week as the market demands.

We have a team of young college grads and interns just to handle the daily interactions online and the ideas they are bringing generated by the market are great :) it is a struggle for our technology tem to keep up with all the new things that they are requesting but it is all worth it in the end.

Our community is growing and growing and we convert thousands per week from simple casual community members into premium members.

This is a completely new market so I doubt that there is any real consulting firm that can 'do it for you' I would hire 1 person with good experience as a 'contract based' consultant to lead you team and get it started. After 6 months, it will take on a life of its own and within 3 months, your team will already know more than the consultant does. :))

Good luck

Simply get all tactics, strategies and pricings at https://www.bluelinerny.com - one of the best advertisers in the world. Based in New York. Very respected agency!