Guest post: Helping clients better understand and engage in social media
Made Social on 03 August 2010 | View Comments
In advance of Social Collective, we have been inviting select people to guest blog and join the SoCol debate, hopefully offering a fresh point of view. We have been asking a range of people to contribute, including those working in social, client side, techies, journos etc with a view of building a wider picture. Any questions raised during this process will be addressed during a panel at SoCol in September.
The latest in the series is from Jonny Stark, aka @jonnystark, THE social media monkey.
Helping clients better understand and engage in social media. It’s a lifelong commitment.
By Jonny Stark
So, you’ve been listening to some of the great and the good of the social media industry talk you through the steps of demonstrating to your clients why they should consider social media, generally answering the question of what it all means to get them going and developing their social media strategy. Push the button and off we go.
But it doesn’t end there.
Genuinely engaging and rewarding social communications don’t happen instantaneously. BT, Dell and Sony are three brands often held up for their efforts in social media. Sure they make mistakes along the way. But I would challenge anyone to find any organisation engaging perfectly! The point is, they’ve taken time to get there. From restructuring and aligning business units, to investing company time and allocating resource.
Any social communications consultant worth his or her salt needs to keep revisiting the strategy on a regular basis (at the very least every six months). Look at what has worked and what hasn’t, as well as feeding in the latest trends, technologies and platforms (filtering them for audience fit first).
Are your audiences bored of YouTube videos being pumped out at them and have they all abandoned social bookmarking? If so, creating yet another ‘compelling’ video is somewhat futile, as is creating page after page in Delicious. There are tools out there that can help you with this, like UM’s Wave research (which is due for an update).
And don’t forget to look at your client’s organisation as well. Have there been major shifts in their internal structure or brand positioning? These have implications for your social communications strategy as it needs to be based on strong internal foundations and also ring true (that word authenticity) for the brand.
We’re consultants. Our clients pay us because they often don’t have the time to devote to keeping up with everything that’s going on or simply lack experience. That includes what the latest thinking is across the industry and what their competitors are up to, as well as other divisions within their own company. Often, they aren’t necessarily aware of what is happening in the furthest outreaches of their organisation and the potential this has to impact on their own activity.
We are their eyes and ears inside and outside their company.
It’s very easy to churn out the same old guff week after week for clients – from strategy to tactics (as this little site reminds us). Another infographic just because we can? No problem. But that’s not anywhere near genuine consultancy. And social communications will continue to get a lot of stick (just visit this well known example to remind yourself of what I’m talking about).
This blog and the Social Collective conference are about best practice and improving understanding across the industry. Which means you need to look at your client relationship long term.
It’s easy to have an expensive one night stand. But much more rewarding all round to build something lasting.
About Jonny Stark
Jonny heads up the social media team at 3 Monkeys Communications, both working alongside account teams to weave social media into their campaigns and advising clients directly on how best to integrate social media into their business.
This varies from setting up specialist cross discipline teams, running research and audits, developing procedures for handling crises, creating processes to deal with customer queries and looking at how the in-house marketing and PR teams can harness social media as part of their on-going work.
Not just a social media theorist, Jonny has delivered successful, award-winning digital PR and social media campaigns for brands such as Sony and the BBC. This has given him experience of what does work and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.
At 3 Monkeys he currently works with Microsoft UK, Calor, THUS Group and Demon Internet, the Office of Fair Trading, Sharp and T.G.I Friday’s.
View other posts in our guest blog series:
The social media strategy series: Getting Buy In by Gemma Went
The tall and the long of it by John V Willshire
Social Media in the 21st Century – Deja Vu all over again by Paul Smith
The Secrets of Pitching Social Media by Paul Sutton
The social media strategy series: Is social media right for your business? by Gemma Went
Talk is cheap by Peter Bouvier
Show social or show business by Chris Hall
Back to the future… by Adam Vincenzini
Managing Client Expectation in Search by Chris Hyland
Get Excited And Make Things by Stuart Witts
