What is social media really doing for your ad agency new business program? (Updated)

None of our posts this year to-date have been about social media and that’s been somewhat purposeful. Before the New Year, we sat down and talked about where we were as a company in regards to social media and what had it really gotten us? Was the amount of time we put into it commensurate with our return up to this point?

The short answer to that last question was, it’s a bit early to say in concrete terms, but mostly, yes, it’s been worth it. (FYI, our blog has existed for a little while, but it was really July of last year that we put a formal push against social media.) We did put some caveats on our social media plan for the first 6 months of this year and we’ll see where we end up. Far from being experts, we did come to a few conclusions I wanted to share and would be interested to see if it strikes a chord.

1) You can’t do it all: We said from the beginning, we’re going to try and be smart about this, participating but not becoming a slave to social media. In that I think we succeeded, but still, 2-3 blog posts a week, plus Twitter and Facebook is a lot of work. Pace yourself.

2) Don’t be overly concerned that what a social media expert tells you is gospel, or that if you handle your strategy differently it’s wrong: It’s not a knock on the social media folks out there, but wow, there are a lot of them, all vying for your eyeballs. Pick a few you like and don’t worry about the rest. It’s always good to get a different perspective, especially from someone who knows what they’re talking about, but you’ll learn from experience how much you can give to social media and what’s working for your space.

3) Activate your social media: With thousands of agencies blogging, you can’t rely on prospects to find you. There are lots of ways to do this, whether it’s a weekly newsletter, LinkedIn group or an online forum.

4) Per Alexander Vanelsas, the real value of social media = interaction. If nothing else, I think this is key to remember in your efforts. If all you’re doing is talking at your colleagues or prospects, I personally don’t think it’s worth your time in regards to agency new business. That doesn’t mean you stop blogging because you haven’t gotten a comment or a retweet lately by the way.

Continuing my last point with an example, we got a little discouraged initially when we re-launched our site and blog because we had very few comments after posts. But now, just about at the six month mark, we realize we succeeded in the interaction, regardless of the number of comments on our blog.

We realized, and inherently knew, people are just way too busy to comment on every blog post we create, especially with 2-3 a week. But the great thing-over these last six months, we’ve gotten some very positive and complimentary feedback on our blog, in direct emails and conversations with clients and prospects. And while good content was key, activating it with our weekly email blog digest, for example, was just as important. In fact, we can directly point to a new client coming on board because of a recent blog post. Now that’s a return.

But we can’t say the same for Twitter, for example. Not to pick on Twitter, but now with followers too numerous to count, it just seems like a place that people talk at each other. I see less and less interaction. I’m sure there are many out there that disagree, and can prove me wrong in regards to their own benefits from Twitter, but that’s our take on it.

(September, 2010 Update: I think I was wrong to a degree here. While there’s still plenty of talking at each other, I think Twitter can be a very effective tool in your new business arsenal as a means of initial interaction.)

Pointing back to Alexander Vanelsas, he recently laid out 5 predictions for 2010 and he says this in regards to status message services:

I believe that in 2010 we will see a backlash of current Twitter and otherstatus message services. These services will be occupied with SPAM andaggregation bots. Twitter traffic may go up, but activity will be mostlycomputer generated. Real people will leave the service alone as the SPAMpressure increases.

I’d have to agree, Twitter’s getting close to that prediction already in my opinion. (September, 2010 Update: Well, guess we were both wrong here as well. Yes, a lot of bots, but plenty of real folks out there still.) But enough about specific services. For the first six months of this year, we decided to keep the blog rolling at full speed and cut back a bit on FB and Twitter for the time being.

There’s just not enough time in the day, especially for small to medium businesses and agencies. As far as we’re concerned, social media is a part of any marketing mix, now and forever. So it’s not that we’re abandoning it, but now that we’ve settled in, it’s time to look past it’s shiny newness and gauge which parts of it are truly valuable.

Read Alex’s The real value of Socail media= Interaction post here