Social Media Charlatans

According to advertising agency review, PR and networking guru, Hank Bank, “With the popularity of social networking all the agencies recommend involvement on social media.  Prior to my meetings with them, I find that they aren’t very robust on social networking.  They have few followers on Twitter, few Facebook Fans and aren’t very active on LinkedIn.  The icons for these platforms aren’t on their site.  They don’t practice what they preach.  They are posers.  I am just a consultant, yet I am more robust than most agencies I meet with.  I am one person and they are companies but they lag.”

Not only is Hank is great friend and mentor, he is correct!  I cannot tell you how often I run across companies requesting a consulting proposal from me asking me to highlight what I can do to improve their social media strategy.  However, a common theme is that the advertising agency has this sort of arrogance towards you because the consultant has been on the “client side” of the business and has not worked for a company in their industry despite the fact that a marketing and social media consultant is really an ad agency without the hype.

Many agencies claim to represent big brands and are the best-kept secret; however, when you examine their work – which is public/transparent, one notices common trends.

Let us take the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and blogging.  For some reason, there is a myth that SEO is done on your main web site as a separate line item when your blog is one of the strongest SEO tools in your social media arsenal.  I see these mistakes far too often:

• No SEO on blog posts – lack of hyperlinks to other great resources and bolding of important key points
• Blog posts are not updated regularly.  Posting once a month looks worse than not posting at all!
• No way to share your content or encourage commenting.  If you are using WordPress.org, there are plugins that auto update for sharing and encouraging comments.

Twitter is another long topic of discussion, but I will keep it short.  Twitter is not a spamming mechanism whereby you tweet out links and expect people to magically visit you without wondering, “What is in it for me?”  Let’s think about it – do you open random emails from strangers with links?  Probably not unless you are bored, and have a REALLY good anti-virus package!  Now what if your friend/colleague sent you an email?  You might be more inclined to open it.  In addition, it depends on what the email is about.  Is the email something useful to you or is it a conversation?  My Friends, Twitter is a conversation – plain and simple.

Here are some mistakes I see:

• Lack of engagement – the more @ replies, the better.  @ replies show engagement and are a way for auto following to distinguish between spam account and real people.
• Not following back.  Unless the account is MLM or spam, I suggest following back.  You do not want to appear too high and mighty.  By the way, following too many without enough followers may indicate you are not interesting enough.

I am just discussing a few points and there are so many that we could write a book.  I know many agencies have been in the business for a long time and this may be a point in history where they are not playing catch up fast enough.  Many newcomers to marketing have recently jumped into the industry via social media and are now quite successful.  Moreover, many large ad agencies have been around forever and take longer to catch up.  Riding the coat tails of previous successes can last only so long.  It is time to invest in you and forge ahead with an open mind.  Do not under-value the need of being on the cutting edge.

Posted by Deepak Gupta

Two things that say it all about the writer of this post,

1.) He knows you’re losing money
2.) He knows how you are losing money