Uneven Distribution.
I’M THE HEAD OF INNOVATION FOR MEDIACOM AUSTRALIA.
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Getting over ‘who owns social media?’
September 6th, 2010
There’s a been a bunch of talk in the last couple weeks around social media, in particular the ownership of it from both an agency and brand point of view. I get asked the ‘ownership’ question a lot. And my response has been the same for a long time now. The best people to manage a brand’s social media monitoring or activity is whoever is best set up to do it. And that really does change on a case by case basis.
I had a few people ask me what was up with my quote in the SMH on Friday, and even though Nina Hendy took a very small soundbite from a much longer conversation, I am completely convinced that the best place for day to day social activity is within the client’s brand team.
But that’s a lot different to the monitoring and insights side of things.
And this is where I see the comments on the Mumbrella post that followed the SMH article getting a bit too simplistic. What gets lost in this debate about who’s posting on a Facebook page and replying to tweets, is the immense amount of insight social media can offer a brand. We’ve recently introduced a suite of social products for MediaCom that take the snake-oil out of social, and the key element that gets clients interested is almost always the insights part of the offering. By having an ongoing social monitoring program, and by having people in the agency offering insight and analysis on this data, everyone benefits; TV, print, press, display, and yes even the guys doing the social media engagement (whether they’re inside or outside the agency).
What I’ve realised through this process is that almost everyone overlooks this value that social monitoring brings to the overall marketing picture. And I now watch with even more interest on how specialist social media agencies (or divisions within agencies, as UM announced today) plan on selling and monetising their services. Because the bulk of real value that a social offering brings to clients actually lies outside social media, so having a business dedicated to just social doesn’t seem like the goldmine many still believe it to be.
I hope we’re beyond the era of snake oil salesman in the social arena, and as a result I hope the conversation can move on from ‘who owns social media, agency or the client?’ to ‘how effectively are you integrating what you’re doing in social into every other part of the marketing mix?’.
Are brands investing enough?
May 14th, 2010
I wrote a short bit for B&T’s “Yes, no, maybe” section a few weeks back. The question posed was “Are major Australian brands investing enough in digital and social media?”.
Being the disagreeable type, I answered with “no”. I never actually saw it in the mag (our subscription didn’t seem to turn up that week), so I’m not entirely sure what the other respondents said. But i thought I’d post it up here to hear any comments, and also because I’ve got another post half done that follows somewhat logically on from this.
Most major Australian brands are at least on their way to spending enough in digital media. But this is just media spend, not investment, and the list of big brands investing sufficiently in digital and social is very short.
In social media, this lack of investment is almost understandable. From a client point of view there is still a lack of real measurement in social. Without proven and established metrics, it is hard to justify investment. I see this as a challenge to agencies (creative, media and PR) to create real, measureable effectiveness in this space.
In the broader digital sense, investment is lacking fundamentally because of campaign-based thinking. Short-term business objectives from clients result in short-term ideas from agencies. The real opportunity in digital is to create long-term platforms and an engaged audience that seek out your brand. But this requires investment.
It’s not a surprising situation to be in. We have clients and agencies climbing out of a GFC, with structures and processes designed for another world. And therein lies the opportunity to really stand out. Now is the time to be taking the lead, by thinking differently and investing in innovation.
