Skip to main content

Do Agencies Get Social Media?

Late last week, MediaPost's Cathy Taylor wrote about the shortcomings of marketing agencies (large ones at least) when it comes to really understanding and utilizing social media on their clients' behalf—or even their own—in Blogger's Block - And Other Ways Agencies Aren't Walking The Walk Of Social Media.

"
As for blogs, the number of agencies that have them is growing, but overall they're still pretty spotty in terms of technical chops and raison d'etre, and there's at times an embarrassing level of "Gee whiz! We're blogging!" to some posts. Haven't you people learned the art of pretending that you know what you're doing? Interpublic Group's Hill, Holliday, which made quite a few headlines a while back when it turned its Web site into a blog, isn't exactly transforming the medium as we know it with its posting prolific-ness. Since October, the agency has posted a dozen times."

She also comes down on DDB for the lack of permalinks on its blog; not exactly techno-savvy for a big agency.

To be sure, there are agencies (smaller ones at least) that clearly "get" social media and use it extensively, such as Skip Lineberg of Maple Creative with his Marketing Genius blog; Albert Maruggi at Provident Partners, guru of the Marketing Edge podcast; Harry Hoover at My Creative Team with THINKing; and possibly this blog, informally associated with KC Associates.

Cathy Taylor's post appears to have gotten very little attention from agency bloggers, perhaps because not only are they not writing blog posts, they aren't even monitoring what's written about them. But there was Selling tickets to the ball? Better learn to dance on the Fluent Simplicity blog: "Agencies promoting blogs and social media suffer from execution problems. Client projects either miss the whole point of blogging and/or (the agencies) don’t offer any in-house examples."

Perhaps big agencies don't get social media because of their still-prevailing TV mindset. Television advertising is fundamentally one-way, interruption-based messaging. Social media is about creating two-way conversations. Smaller agencies, who do little if any TV ad work, are better positioned to take advantage of blogging, podcasting, interactive PR, social networking and other techniques of conversational marketing.

On the other hand, Matt Dickman, director of digital practice at Fleishman-Hillard and author of the highly popular Techno//Marketer blog, shows that some big agencies do indeed get social media. He'll be speaking at The Fine Line in Minneapolis on Monday.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Comments

Anonymous said…
I actually work at SAVO, a b to b technology company, and we definitely leverage social media in our sales enablement technology. We use personal pages (similar to my space), star ratings (on documents, insights or expertise) and comments to leverage an organization's expertise, insight and collective genius to drive better customer conversations. Ultimately, we enable sales to be more productive. Check out our latest webinar, "Moving Beyond the Sales Portal -- Capturing Mindshare in a Web 2.0 World" Click here to attend: https://savoevents.webex.com/savoevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=664757276

All Time Greats

7 Reasons Every Business Needs to Twitter

This post has been moved to 7 Reasons Every Business Needs to be on Twitter on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter del.icio.us tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter icerocket tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even businesses that use l

Book Review: Website Optimization

This post has been moved to Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool del.icio.us tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool icerocket tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati

Feedback Friday

Give us some feedback on how we are doing! We would love to hear how we can improve our website and the advice we dish out to our readers. And while you are at it, check out some of our favorite articles from the past few weeks: https://www.digitalrdm.com/5-components-successful-branding-strategy/ https://www.paulandpaul.com/what-are-the-different-types-of-trademarks-and-trademark-laws https://www.lawfirmmarketingcompany.com/content-marketing http://saffwein.com/concussions-car-accident/ http://www.newsworld.site/space-force-future/ http://www.newsworld.site/what-to-do-if-you-are-involved-in-a-forklift-accident/ http://www.newsworld.site/trump-sanctions-russia-election-meddling/ http://www.newsworld.site/bracket-busted-no-13-buffalo-upsets-no-4-arizona/ http://www.newsworld.site/candidate-alvin-de-levie-demands-change-and-transparency-at-psu-board/

Email Campaign, Newsletter and Banner Ad Click-Through Rates (CTR)

When planning online advertising and email promotion budgets, it's critical to calculate the likely ROI upfront whenever possible, as well as to establish campaign benchmarks. The first step is understanding the average and likely range of CTRs for various programs. The growth in online advertising, the proliferation of enewsletters, the emergence of new forms of information delivery such as RSS and the emergence of social media sites have all affected CTR, so planning based on current data is crucial. It can be challenging to find current statistics, but based on several studies, these are typical CTR ranges for email newsletter ads, email campaigns (blasts or internally-produced enewsletters), and banner ads. Email newsletter advertisements Open rates range from 28-40%, with an average of about 33%—meaning that roughly one-third of the subscriber base is likely to see your ad. The Advertising Is Good For You blog tracks these statistics from DoubleClick . The average CT