The Social Enthusiast

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Todd Defren.  He’s been innovating social media as a corporate communications channel since well before social media became the marcomm flavor of the month.  I know of few professional marketers in social media who haven’t referred to his original social media newsroom PDF at some point.  

But I have to take exception to a recent post he’s written on how some agencies go about adding social media expertise to their service offerings.   

He makes a compelling point that integration is key–with which I fully agree.  But unless I’m missing something, his stance appears to be that having a dedicated internal team that specializes in digital communications and social media fluency is the equivalent of bolting a food processor onto a farm tractor and calling it a mobile raw food restaurant.

Say what? 

His point seems to be (as best I can make sense of it) that traditional agencies with no prior digital emphasis and no internal staff already fluent in corporate use of social media should transform their entire organization into a social media savvy agency.  

No word on exactly how an agency is supposed to pull that off without hiring a few folks that have some social media experience or allowing existing staff with at least the right aptitudes and skills to dedicate themselves to developing that experience and lead the efforts of integration.  

Also no word on how they should respond to their clients’ desire to begin engaging consumers in social media with an agency that they already trust while this magical (and presumably not instantaneous) transformation into a top-to-bottom social organization is taking place.  

He also says that charging clients an additional fee to provide social media strategy and execution in addition to traditional services is "greedy."  Because it’s not like we charge a bigger fee for clients who get both event management and media relations services from the agency.  Or require more hours per month because of the volume of the work we do for them.  

There’s also the question of “where’s the line?”  Say a journalist starts tweeting or becomes a freelance blogger.  Who now owns the relationship — is it OK that the “traditional” PR pro wants to maintain the relationship, even though the channel supposedly “belongs” to their peers in the Social Media Department?  This is an issue of RESPONSIBILITY.  

It’s interesting that he brings this up, since I ran into exactly this situation just last week.  I needed to contact a print journalist who also happens to be one of the most influential people on blogs and forums related to a topic related to one of my clients to get some insights on the online community for that topic.  How, oh how, did I solve this insurmountable difficulty?

I called the media relations person on the account, we had a friendly five minute conversation, and I contacted him with her blessing and introduction.  Apparently, neither of us needed to "own the relationship" with this guy to do our respective jobs.

I agree that integration is an important goal for agencies who want to offer both digital and traditional services. In fact, in my opinion, integration between traditional and digital/social is the biggest challenge facing advertising agencies and public relations firms right now.  That said, integration is an incredibly difficult process.  I have a hard time believing that there’s One True Way to get there.   If you’ve committed to a strategy to get there and you’re making progress, kudos to you, I say.   

Arguing that having a social media department is never a valid path to integration seems a little heavy handed to me.  As with almost anything, your mileage may vary.  But it’s working for us so far. 

What do you think? How would an agency go about injecting social media fluency at all levels without, you know, having some folks with a high degree of social media fluency around who have the dedicated time to devote to it?  Do you personally think it’s necessary for every person at a PR firm or advertising agency to be a digital adept? 

img courtesy tam_oliver on sxc