There’s a bubbling, burgeoning cottage industry of social media vendors out there. Some are traditional agencies claiming social media expertise. Others are small shop upstarts with very clever automated solutions and workflow tools.
Having now conducted dozens of consults with members who have completed their social media maturity diagnostic, we noticed a real appetite amongst members for help navigating this kaleidoscopic (is that even a word?) vendor landscape.
Everyone from Jeff Bezos at Amazon to the mass of worldwide trendspotters at Trendwatching is touting the power of consumer-generated online product and service ratings. That sparked a thought…why not bring the Council network to bear against a social media vendor ratings system? So we are.
If the first 15 member submissions are any guide, you can expect to get an unvarnished view—the average member rating on social media vendors is 3.7 on a five point scale. Compare that to the average product rating online by consumers at 4.3 (fun read in the WSJ on consumer rating grade inflation). We promise you this: we won’t selectively forget to include negative ratings in the database.
But to make this work, your peers in the Marketing Leadership Council need your help. Have any experience with a social media vendor, good, bad or ugly? MLC members, please take 5 minutes to share your experience via this confidential online review form. Those members who share their experience will get advance access to the vendor ratings exchange, which we will deliver online to the broader membership in Q1 2010.
