I get the impression we've forgotten about this.

One of my first blog posts naively focused on the three thing you need in social media to succeed. Surprisingly, I think it still accounts for my most visited blog post, despite its broadness in scope. I foolishly rattled off:

1. Be Human
2. Educate Yourself
3. Don’t Do Everything.Just Do It Right.

I say “foolishly” because I believe, even then, I was clinging to the same bullshit tenets that many other social marketers hold dear to their hearts, and use as fodder for social media strategies. After removing my marketing hat, and “being human” for a moment, I realized that there’s really only one thing you need to be successful in social media, and it has nothing to do with social media. It does, however, have everything to do with basic marketing.

It seems like we’ve become so impressed with ourselves that we overlook the most basic tenets of marketing, like the very first “P”: Product. And we’re so obsessed with “the right messaging,” that we completely fail to ask the question: Is that product any good?

Messaging matters. But the quality of the product is even more important.

Social media has the power to amplify your story, as well as those of your customers’. Your customers, however, aren’t going to be telling stories about your social marketing prowess. They’re going to be telling stories of their experience with your product. Whether they’re happy or dissatisfied. Wouldn’t you rather the former? If so, then don’t look to marketing as the answer to your problems. Look to product development and experience design.

The backbone of social is providing something worth talking about. If you want flash in the pan success, then go for that funny viral video, or interesting microsite. But that isn’t the key to long-lasting conversation and advocation.

I recently joined a new gym, Blink Fitness, which is owned by Equinox. It’s far from having the same level of amenities as Equinox, but it has enough of what I need, as well as the fit and finish of a higher-end gym. Since having joined, I’ve written a glowing Yelp review, posted to their Facebook wall, written a status update about it, told four of my friends, and brought one of them with me to try it out. All in the matter of three weeks. Despite having a Facebook page, which is pretty basic in functionality, the company has little in the way of marketing (social included).

So, what got me so excited to share my experience with everyone? The gym itself.

At the end of the day, what gets people talking, what gets them fired up and itching to share the news, is a cool product. Not the marketing. Not the number of fans or followers. The product. If you want to see success, instead of spending your money on a social media agency, spend it at a service/product design firm, and give them the keys to the kingdom. Make sure you’re providing the absolute best experience, and THEN worry about spreading the word. I guarantee you’ll achieve better results.

Note: I was recently pointed to an article by Rick Webb from The Barbarian Group that champions these thoughts and figured it would be of interest.

Who's more valuable left or right-brain people? Trick question.

I joined the hordes of tech geeks down in Austin last week for my first SXSW. Between the countless parties, including one full of steam punkers (go ahead and look it up), I found myself at a number of interesting speaker sessions, mostly about advertising, technology, and innovation. One of the sessions I attended, however, was about the necessary balance between technology and creativity.

Speaker John Davis asserted that the argument over who delivers greater value to an assignment or task, tech heads or creatives, is a divisive one that needs to be squashed, given the need for both to create quality work. It’s an old debate, but it’s especially prevalent today in social marketing, where the desire for measurement and analytics is seemingly greater than the desire for interesting creative work.

No single person is good at everything, Davis said. It goes without saying, but he urged that everyone needs to work together in order to produce the best work. As a strategist, I personally fall on the side of creativity and bigger picture thinking. And while I’m analytical in nature, ANALYTICS is admittedly not my strong suit. But there are plenty of people within Dachis Group for me to defer to and collaborate with should I come across a problem I can’t solve alone.

To that point, although corporations could certainly use our services in the area of social business design, I think there are plenty of agencies, which are hired for their interdisciplinary skills, that could use our services as well. I have a lot of friends throughout the ad industry, and the ones in larger, “more established,” firms say they run into many of the same political and cultural issues that our clients have.

Companies come to us (agencies) for solutions. If they only knew how broken and mechanized our own internal workflows and processes were, they wouldn’t hire us, simply based on assumption that we’re no better off than they are. At no other place, short of maybe Apple, is the combination of technological and creative expertise as necessary as within an agency. We live and die by our ability to effortlessly collaborate with one another to get the job done. But are we all really walking the walk?

The short answer is no. Many of the most fabled agencies in the space have gotten so large their cultures have stagnated, and their employees have become cogs in a massive machine. How are these supposed change makers, cool hunters, and futurists supposed to solve their clients’ problems, when they can’t solve their own? It seems like everyone, from the pews to the pulpit, could stand to be a little more social.

The 4 archetypes that guide Dachis Group's social business design are Ecosystem, Hivemind, Dynamic Signal, and Metafilter.

Powered, the social media agency I worked for, was recently acquired by Dachis Group. Through this new venture of his, Razorfish co-founder, Jeffrey Dachis, is trying to validate a concept that has grown a pair of legs over the last few years: Social Business. It’s a relatively new concept to me, having spent all my time working on the consumer engagement side of social media. In a nutshell, however, it’s the process of internalizing social media ideals and applying many of those same consumer-facing archetypes to internal communications, policies, processes, and corporate culture, ultimately leading to a better company that makes better products.

My views and beliefs about social media have been called contrarian and I’ve frequently been labeled a devil’s advocate. But the truth is, I never saw myself falling into social in the first place. I didn’t touch social media, professionally, until my last internship in college, when I was doing blogger outreach for the launch of Dirt Candy. The reason for my skepticism stems from my belief that most social media programs are inherently digital campaigns cleverly dressed in Facebook fan pages and YouTube profiles. I think it’s naive to believe that the majority of the industry doesn’t lump social into digital, and for good reason. We, as marketers, fail to draw significant lines between the two.

Then again, should we be drawing lines at all?

I’ve written about the pervasiveness of social, and how the lines between media are becoming blurred. What I don’t hope for, however, is everything to be powered by Facebook Connect. If the future of social is to be determined by sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, then my skepticism about its future is well-founded, and it will fail to escape digital’s sphere of influence to become a ubiquitous force that knows no departmental bounds.

But I have hope; and it comes from social business design.

My antithetical attitudes towards social are born out of a desperate belief that it’s so much more powerful than what we’re currently doing with it. We talk about how disruptive a force social media is, and how it’s changing the landscape forever, but what are we really doing to drive that grandiose change? Surely it isn’t Twitter races.

I’ve always been a firm believer in the notion that people don’t develop affinities for brands just because they have a fan page, or tweet 3-5 times a day. People ultimately grow closer to brands because of the benefits they render in our lives. I used to be a hardcore Microsoft and Windows user. That is, until the iPhone came out, which led me to a MacBook, which led me to an iMac, and soon enough an iPad (com’on 2nd generation). I got caught in Apple’s famous halo effect; but I’m not ashamed.

I was introduced to many of Apple's other great products following my original iPhone purchase.

That transition didn’t happen because Apple had a YouTube contest or an elaborate fan acquisition strategy. It’s because they create wonderful products. It’s as simple as that. You’ll be hard pressed to find a direct connection between a company’s social media marketing and long-lasting effects on their bottom line. What you will find is a direct connection between the creation of better, more innovative, products and increased sales and demand.

It’s believed that social business design has the power to transform a company into an environment where free-thinking and innovation can thrive, theoretically leading to better ideas and better products. Corporate process change may not sound as sexy, but I believe that what we’re currently doing with social media, as an industry, is only skin deep. We have merely scratched the surface of what I think is possible through the democratization of these tools; at least I hope so. Because if this is it, then I might as well go back to my digital roots.

I don’t think this is it, however. I believe there’s a long road ahead for social; and thankfully it doesn’t lead to marketing more effectively on Facebook. We should aspire to more. We should challenge ourselves to find greater purpose for an idea that can potentially change the way business is conducted forever. We simply have to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and believe that we’re on the cusp of something much larger and much more powerful than what we initially set out to achieve.

Note: The views expressed on this blog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer, past or present.

Something I have noticed, both through observation and firsthand experience, is the obsession brand marketers, as well as agencies, have with turning to Facebook to resolve their social media challenges.

Jim Carroll (Chairman, BBH London) recently weighed in on a subject he calls Wind Tunnel Marketing. The idea is that we’ve become so committed to becoming “relevant” to our customers that we’ve forgotten the importance of being different.

Oftentimes, we look to Facebook as the solution to our problems because we have all come to believe that’s where our customers are. Where I find myself at odds with marketing in Facebook isn’t so much the idea that we all think our customers might be there. That very well may be true. It’s our “drive to identify best demonstrated practice, to codify it and coach it.”

An excerpt from the Labs post really stood out to me:

Few noticed, as we learned to lean more heavily on our norms and pre-tests, that expertise and judgement were a devaluing currency.

And few noticed, at least at first, that the measures designed to raise the floor of communication output were at the same time lowering the ceiling.

I believe there’s a place for research and best practices; but there’s also a place for gut instinct and dissension. The problem with everyone measuring themselves by the same yardstick is that we end up looking and acting the same as well. I hate to break it to some, but following the common best practices aren’t the key to solving your social media woes. Having the best Facebook page within your competitive set is not the answer.

You’re preaching to the converted on your Facebook page. And I can tell you now, they aren’t fans of your page because you update it 3-5 times a week, consistently reply to users, or follow any number of other Facebook best practices. They’re fans because they have always liked your brand, and only represent a fraction of the people who do.

Turning those few fans into advocates for your brand will not come as a function of following the best practices. It will happen because you decide to do something different. Or, more appropriately, it will happen because you decide to do something worth talking about.

Everyone these days likes to point to Old Spice as a good case study. The campaign’s success online had absolutely nothing to do with its Facebook page, which happens to follow all the best practices, or its blog, which most definitely does not. Instead it had everything to do with providing content so interesting, so creative, so different, that people felt compelled to spread it through their social graph, whether they were a fan of the brand or not.

There are two ways to build advocacy. You can preach to the converted and hope they evangelize the message out; or, you can focus on new acquisition and attempt to bring people into the fold. Either way, you won’t get there by reading from the same book as everyone else. Dr. Gregory House isn’t entertaining to watch because he follows the rules. Likewise, people aren’t going to talk about your brand to their friends if you aren’t doing anything noteworthy, regardless of how much they like you.

Carrol holds that, “Wind Tunnel Marketing is turning communication into a numbers game, a game where scale of resource wins every time – whether that be media budget, distribution network or sales team. The cost efficiencies of brand differentiation are notable largely by their absence.”

If we all march to the beat of the same drum, the ones to finish line first will be those with the most money to spend. But recent history has shown that by innovating in your communications whenever possible, the necessity to buy attention becomes needless.

There’s something I’ve thought about for some time, and was perpetuated by Zach Lieberman, a speaker at the PSFK Conference last week. Lieberman, who is a creative technologist, had a talk about Engaging the Human Element, and “making deeply engaging, entertaining and meaningful interactions” through art and technology. He talked about the power of individuals, and touched on a trend of the shift from DIY to DIWO (Do It With Others); an interesting notion that speaks to to the heart of social.

Joseph (Jaffe) would say that social’s purpose for brands is to Acknowledge, Incentivize, Dialogue, and Activate (AIDA as opposed to ADIA) its customers who would then act as advocates for the brand, bringing new customers into the fold. That’s one way of looking at it, and a legitimate way to use it.

Many others in the industry see social is an opportunity for brands to go to where their customers are (online), in order to listen and engage in dialogue. And if there’s a real opportunity for it, act as a unifier, bringing like-minded people together around a common idea, belief, or hobby through a branded community.

But when I had a conversation with a peer of mine, a third angle came up; one that speaks to the point Lieberman made at the conference. Is social capable of being more than just a response/support/inducement tool? What is the purpose of launching a branded community? Are we facilitating conversations for the sake of having conversations? What is the end goal? Lieberman’s work, such as the Eyewriter and Drawn, is about leaving the screen behind. He talked about the “Open Mouth Moment”, when a person drops their jaw in amazement at something they just experienced. He described this as “the pathway to someone’s heart.” How do we create these social experiences? How do we move beyond the Facebooks, Twitters, and YouTubes of the world and get people talking again?

The advent of social media did not mark the beginning of people talking to each other, or about brands. It merely facilitates conversations, but it isn’t the reason why people talk. People talked about Lieberman’s Drawn because it was an “Open Mouth Moment”. It’s about a strong message or idea that’s worth sharing. Most self-proclaimed “social media experts” are internetologists (a point I won’t contend) who rely on incentives over emotions. Dare I say it, this is something social marketers stand to learn from the Big Dumb Agencies (BDA), as George Parker would call them. Whether it sits well with you or not, before Facebook’s founders were even born, these agencies rose to prominence on the backs of people’s emotions. And even then, people talked about and recommended brands.

An "Open Mouth Moment" at the Draw art installation by Zach Lieberman

Griffin Farley, a Strategy Director at BBH and author of Propagation Planning, recently discussed something missing from social media that has long guided traditional advertising: Brand Mantras.

“Good creative briefs can do a great job of inspiring advertising but recently I have discovered that they don’t do a great job of grounding social media actions. I think Brand Mantras do a much better job of this because they describe an emotion, a theme, a writing style that can be used as the guide for the voice of the brand in social media.”

He went on to cite a Brand Mantra in the form of a poem written for CNN. Guess who wrote it. Mother New York; Creativity Magazine’s pick for 2009 Agency of the Year.

“Agency” shouldn’t be a bad word. It’s only begun to take on negative connotations, but we shouldn’t equate the term to immorality. We should instead take hold of it, reshape it, and bring it back to a point of distinction. There are many things BDAs do well, and there are many things that they do poorly, like thinking small. But that same point can be turned around and said about smaller boutiques; most especially social shops. Logistics aside, like the inability to scale, social marketers have forgotten the pathway to people’s hearts. They’ve embroiled themselves so deeply in “Activation” strategies that they’ve forgotten human strategies.

Social media is missing its soul, if it ever had one. Strong ideas and “Open Mouth Moments” are all the reason people need to propagate an idea; not free shipping offers and discount coupons. The tools are merely there to help spread the word, but they shouldn’t be the idea itself. The Obama campaign had one strong, succinct idea that used the tools simply as a way to circulate it: “Change”. It was simple; but it’s that simplicity which made it stir the collective emotions of a nation.

Lieberman said “The process of creating art is in many ways an R & D department for humanity”. I implore this industry to remember back to what made us smile and cry as humans. To capture that raw emotion, and recreate that pathway to people’s hearts.

The idea of agencies and companies thinking small is no new notion. People have been saying it for years, including Greg, who’s gong to push the point further in his upcoming book, microMarketing. The problem is, very few have actually been practicing it. At the PSFK Conference in New York last week, Andy Spade and Anthony Sperduti of Partners & Spade gave a “Think Small” presentation highlighting the work they did for J.Crew.

Prefacing their lecture, they shared their passion for film, publishing, and product development, which helped guide the work they did for J.Crew. The brand’s menswear had little equity. Partners & Spade felt that regardless of how they tackled the problem, going in waving the J.Crew banner would make their plan fall flat. It was a big brand that everyone already knew, and expressly didn’t care about. They had to develop a strategy that shrunk J.Crew. Something that made the brand more intimate and approachable. Because, like the partners said on stage, “no one likes big.”

An interior shot of the J.Crew Liquor Store in TriBeCa.

To answer the call, the partners decided to open a liquor store. But not your average slipshod speakeasy. It was an abandoned TriBeCa tavern restored and restocked with J.Crew’s menswear instead of booze. The boutique is affectionately named “Liquor Store“. The shop is adorned in a way that gives it a lot of classic male character and makes is very distinctive from a typical J.Crew outlet; to the point that you wouldn’t know it’s a J.Crew store. The partners went so far as to staff the store with their own people, including Tremaine Romeo, the “Storetender”; sell some exclusive clothing and accessories; create specialized products, such as throwing darts and shot glasses; and even published a book, “What A Man Should Know”.

The Liquor Store was deemed a great success by the partners, and was written up in dozens of blogs and magazines who they said wouldn’t have written about the store otherwise if it had been branded as a typical J.Crew location. It was the small, cozy and personalized nature of the boutique that made people especially interested in it. In other words, a big brand acting small made it that much more compelling. The partners believe that the bigger a brand gets, the smaller it needs to act. An idea defended by a quote Spade likes to use: “For every accountant you hire, hire an artist” to maintain the delicate balance of big and small.

Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of software development company, 37Signals, spoke at the AdAge Digital Conference this week and blasted “full-service” ad agencies, using the same grounds as those used by Partners & Spade: think small. He made the point that agencies are trying to do everything for everyone, instead of focusing on a small number of things that they do very well, championing specialization over full-service end-to-end.

“Companies end up hiring people to do these things they don’t know how to do, they get really big and then they slow down. That’s how you get big and slow and expensive. What’s wrong with doing just a few things really well?,” Fried said. He recently co-authored Rework which reiterated this point.

It’s easy for agencies to think too big. Oftentimes they assume they have to in order to stay competitive, or successfully launch a project. But the Liquor Store, and the story of 37Signals for that matter, act as as testaments that bigger isn’t always better. “Think small” is often looked upon as an idealistic buzz phrase, hardly ever applicable in real world situations. But there are numerous examples where thinking and acting small paid off. It’s about sticking to your guns when you have a good idea, big or small. Big Bang Theory sized strategies are not the best solution most of the time, and tend to be filled with elements that underperform.

Years ago, before giving up “the noble profession of journalism,” as my father puts it, I remember going to the CSPA convention and listening to a New York Times writer who said something that stuck with me to this day, and something I think applies here: It’s not about using big words. It’s about using the right words.

At the PSFK Conference 2010, Erik Proulx, creator, executive producer, and writer of the short film Lemonade, as well as the founder of Please Feed the Animals, spoke in front of the large crowd at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. It goes without saying that all of the speakers were inspiring, forcing ideas to spark off in my mind. But after hearing Proulx speak, and watching Lemonade during the lunch break (also available on DVD and through Hulu), a swirl of emotions stirred inside me.

He didn’t speak about a new technological advancement; or acknowledge some growing trend that marketers should heed. He spoke about something so basic in nature, that I think its simplicity has been lost: doing what you love. The film Lemonade is a nice accompaniment to Proulx’s Please Feed the Animals website; a blog for members of the advertising community who have lost their job to vent and look for a new one at the on-site job board.

The film highlights a number of former advertising executives who lost their jobs over the last year or so, and the moment of clarity they had afterwards that convinced them to uncover and take up the things they forgot they loved.

The title of this post is a quote that Proulx shared during his presentation and was something that really stuck with me. I look at my friends and family members’ lives and I wonder if they’re really doing what it is they love. My father wanted to be a marine biologist when he was younger. He affirms to me that he enjoys his job enough, but is “enough” adequate? I think of one of my best friends, who went from dreams about being a music producer to pulling all-nighters at a local Trader Joe’s. I’ve been fortunate enough to land a job, doing more or less exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I couldn’t be happier to be honest.

I wanted to promote Lemonade because it reminded me of something that I think people tend to forget, or think of lightly: do what you love. It wasn’t long ago that Greg (Verdino) told me that he actually wanted to work in the music business. There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’re good at (he happens to be good at marketing), but I challenge him to pick music back up again. Even if it’s something he only does on the weekend. In fact, I challenge you all to do the same.

Dig deep down inside yourself. Write down all the things that make you happy. All the things you’re passionate about. And find a way to fit it into your life. One of the women in the film, Michelle Pfennighaus, made the apt point that you don’t have to quit your job to make a profound change in your life. Whether it’s home-brewing coffee, practicing yoga, or painting, take a step back and do something for yourself. Find out whatever it is that makes you smile, and hold on to it; because it’s easy to lose yourself.

This post is more so a raw and unrefined observation/opinion of mine, rather than a picking apart of the two services. For some time I’ve wanted to write a blog post about how Facebook has become the new mass media, or how Twitter has seemingly morphed to a medium, but I think it’s probably even smarter to discuss the ubiquity of these two services as it encompasses both topics.

I think it goes without saying that Facebook and Twitter are huge. Taking a quick glance at their usage statistics, you’ll see they’ve grown into behemoths in the social space.

As a disclaimer, I’m well aware that Twitter’s advertised user base of 75 million is grossly inflated, being as only 21% of its users are actually active, according to a brand new study by Barracuda Networks. But that’s neither here nor there, and doesn’t change the point of my argument.

When you get a new client and they want to go social, what’s the first thing you think of? Odds are, most of you raised your hand for Facebook. I’ll give it to you that Twitter isn’t for everyone, but let’s focus on Facebook for right now, a name that has basically become everyday diction for us. Do you realize that we all seem to immediately snap to Facebook? As if you’re retarded if you’re not on it.

I’m not saying that it’s not without good reason. It’s a stellar social network. It’s got everything from profiles, to photos and videos, to status updates, to corporate fan pages and groups. And it’s only getting better. The mobile site is brilliantly designed, and has grown to become the most visited mobile social network . So, I’m not here to say shame on you for looking to Facebook, but I do want to challenge you with the question: Why? Is it because all your other clients ended up with a Facebook Fan Page? Do you have a genuine argument as to why it’s the first thing that comes to mind, or is it because that’s just “what we do” nowadays?

Twitter, on the other hand, has reached a status that to me is quite different from Facebook. Because of the nature of the two services, I feel that Twitter took a different path, one towards channelization. Facebook is a social networking site. Twitter is a medium. I could be getting ahead of myself here, but the fashion in which Twitter has grown and is used, has led me to believe that we could be thinking about it all wrong. I don’t think Twitter is a social networking platform anymore; it’s transformed (not transcended) into something instrumental.

I think on some level it’s become as ordinary and unremarkable as the telephone, or email. We talk about not focusing on the tools, and I wholeheartedly agree. But isn’t that argument used to make the point of putting strategy ahead of tactics. What if Twitter really is just a tool. A tool like my iPhone, or my Samsung/TiVo combo. What is Twitter used for? Communication. It’s only a communication, and sometimes entertainment, tool; no different from the telephone or television. And the way we’ve instructed clients to use it, reflects that.

We measure our clients’ customer relationships in Facebook fans. We measure their “address book” in Twitter followers.

Sure it’s because of their mammoth size, but does anyone else realize that we’ve turned these two sites into the “Break Glass In Case of Emergency” social media services. They’ve become ubiquitous with the term Social Media. When you explain your job to your relatives, what do you say? I’d be surprised if neither Facebook nor Twitter came out of your mouth. When did “social media” become synonymous with these two sites/services/tools?

It’s a hackneyed term, and the vast majority of us don’t deserve the title, but why aren’t we called Digital Anthropologist or Ethnographers? Regardless of how many people may hate the usage of that title (and rightfully so), those same people (I’d hope) also understand that at the end of the day our job is about human beings connecting with human beings. Aren’t we all just digital social workers, hopefully making some kind of difference in peoples’ lives through smiles, laughter, or tears?

When did Facebook and Twitter become the masters of the universe, which have come to define our professional existences? And when did we become tools ourselves?

Disclaimer: I started this post over a month ago and just never got to finish. Hopefully, it’s still halfway relevant.

If we’re being honest, I started on my path in marketing under the impression that I was going to be concepting billboards, television spots, magazine ads, working with emerging technology, etc. Partially because that’s what we’re taught in school, and partially because I was addicted to Mad Men (congratulations on the third Golden Globe). Nonetheless, it wasn’t so much that I was enamored with the idea of traditional advertising. It was that I strongly believed in integrated advertising. I still do.I now find myself in social media marketing. A fairly new discipline, many times separated from the rest of the action by clients. And unfortunately, the problem is two-fold.

Social is usually cutoff from the rest of the marketing mix and placed on a petri dish, insulated from the outside world. And like a child who’s sheltered their whole life by anxious parents, it doesn’t socially develop properly (no pun intended). Social won’t ever learn to properly integrate with marketing plans unless it’s included from the jump. That’s not to say it can’t work any other way. Social’s been shoehorned into plans many times before, but how often has it felt like it was an afterthought? Or even worse, a social program shares no common messaging with the overall integrated campaign.

That’s only one part of the problem. The bigger issue is that social isn’t easy enough for brands and large agencies to adopt. They like the idea of social, and they’ll dabble in it; kick a program or two off. But the fact that social itself isn’t integrated is reason enough to understand why brands aren’t emphatically jumping at the opportunity to include a deep social program in their campaigns.

As you might have read in my About Me page, I work(ed) for crayon. That is until Powered came along. Powered used to consider themselves a technology company. They had clients and they did social media workshops and the like, but their claim to fame was their white label community platform. They purchased crayon, Drillteam Marketing, and StepChange Group to become the “first full-service social media agency of scale.”

We’re going through our growing pains right now, and working on integrating our various services to create a lean, streamlined organization. But in theory, this kind of organization is what social media marketing needs. After hearing our CEO, Ken Nicolson, tell the vision of the organization, I began to realize how worthy of a cause this was.

Currently, the main way clients handle full-scaled social programs is by hiring 2, 3, or 4 different shops to get the job done. This creates the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen”, and it becomes a clusterfuck of a situation. I don’t blame companies for being apprehensive in getting involved in such a fiasco. After all, they’ve never had to go to so many different people to get a campaign done before. Why should they now have to interact with four different companies, who do four different things, to get one job done. Sure, they could go to a large agency who could subcontract the work out to four different shops on your behalf, but then you’re paying for added overhead.

The point is, the need for an integrated approach to social media was long overdue and desperately needed. We need fewer individuals talking about how smart they are in the space, and more individuals banding together to serve our clients better.