By Erin Lynch-Klarup
Looking for help developing your social media strategy? Want a new Facebook application but don’t know where to start? The growth of social media has given rise to a flood of new vendors proffering solutions to almost every aspect of social media marketing.
To help harness collective knowledge of vendor performance, the Marketing Leadership Council launched a Social Media Vendor Review Tool, where marketers can review vendors they’ve worked with and access other reviews from peers.
We’ve collected 36 reviews to date, and we’ve noticed a few general trends across these reviews:
- Across social media objectives that vendors were engaged to help with, Listening (capturing insights and feedback from target customers) was by far the most prevalent, followed by Talking (Sharing information with target customers) .
- Reviewers were especially pleased with the expertise of vendor teams, and with the level of client service they experienced.
- Reviewers expressed more ambivalence with regard to value relative to cost and achievement of objectives, with about a 25% reporting neutral or dissatisfied views across these metrics.
These last two trends suggest that while there are some highly skilled social media vendors out there, Marketers may be having trouble matching the right vendor to the right objective in order to maximize value.
Member Ratings of 36 Social Media Vendors | Click Image to Enlarge
MLC members, check out the vendor reviews your peers have submitted. Find out which vendor’s “startup and deliverables have been very late” — and which vendor has done a great job with long term WOM strategy and short-term experimentation. Better yet: help us keep the vendor review database alive by reviewing a vendor you’ve worked with here.
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