For the last few years, we’ve been giving our Social Media Opportunity Diagnostic to companies interested in optimizing their marketing spend and impact in the social space. We’ve generated a pretty impressive sample size in those two years – over 500 very large to mid-sized companies, all told – and we figured we’d go back to the data this week, just to see if there was anything particularly surprising that surfaced.
Oh, boy, was there ever. We cut our dataset in two – companies that have hired social media vendors, and companies that haven’t – and asked the data: how satisfied, on average, is each of these groups with their business results?
The ugly truth – noting, of course, that we’ve controlled for other factors:
In other words, companies that have kept social media marketing strategy in-house are almost twice as likely to be satisfied with the business results they’re getting as companies that have engaged agencies to work on high-level strategy. Perhaps some of this is confirmation bias; we tend to be more pleased with the results of our own work than the results of others’. But there’s an important nugget of truth in there: social media agencies and experts don’t nearly deliver the value they promise, and what’s more, they can’t possibly do it.
Take it from me: I’m a former agency pro, and at one point in my career, unironically called myself a “social media expert”. My firm, I think, was one of the better ones; we were smart, we worked hard for our clients, and we got a lot of one-off results. But enduring business results were never in the offing, at least not because of anything we did. Why? Because social media isn’t an administrative task you can outsource to a vendor, like media buying – it’s a channel that requires re-thinking the way a company views itself within, and in comparison to, its customers and the rest of society. That kind of change can only be led internally, by someone familiar with that organization’s culture – and that’s a position that 99.9% of vendors will never, ever be in.
But I reserve special vitriol for the agencies and consultants that promise lasting business results. A lot of folks will pay lip service to internal cultural knowledge and changes, but in the same breath will ask for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of your company’s money in exchange for their “expertise”, which often consists of having read a few Clay Shirky books and writing a lot of silly stuff on Twitter. Companies go for it – which makes a kind of sense, since social is hard to figure out, time-consuming to plan for, and often asks people and organizations to do things that violate long-held conceptions of the world. So you hire an agency or a fast-talking consultant, and are inevitably disappointed with the results.
Next time you go to hire an agency, remember a few things:
No one’s an expert. Seriously. Human interaction with technology is constantly evolving at a pace unimaginable to any one person. New norms and ways of interacting with peers via the web come and go fast. There are academics who devote their lives to the study of how people act on social platforms, and never get close to “the” answer (although they find out a lot of interesting stuff along the way). Be suspicious of anyone who claims expertise in social marketing.
Outside people can’t solve inside problems. Getting good at social requires a culture shift – and I say that with as little judgment as possible (i.e. I don’t think a pro-social culture shift is necessarily a good thing). If you’re not willing to undergo the shift, an outside agency or consultant can’t help you get there in any appreciable way.
Beware of one-size fits all models. Agencies make their money, in part, by transferring expertise: making things they learn from one client applicable to another. Sometimes they stretch a bit, and sometimes their expertise on consumer markets and behaviors isn’t transferable at all. If an agency touts work they’ve done for competitors or exemplar companies, without playing up their decision-making processes or smarts – be wary.
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