the replacements

You Be Me For A While And I’ll Be You (or why social media is not getting the return for your agency you thought it would)

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First, welcome to our 200th post! We’ll try not to injure our arms patting ourselves on the back.

In all seriousness, it has been a real pleasure to be a part of this blog, and to see where it’s taken us in the year and a half we’ve been writing it and engaging in social media.

We just recently added a social media component/service to our core offering with the goal of helping those clients who want to build a social media strategy within the context of overall ad agency new business. I mention that, not to tout our new addition, but to explain why we’re doing it now.

The main reason is straightforward, clients are asking. But the other reasons are problems we see as symptomatic of a great majority of ad agency social media. A few of these below:

1) Your social media output (including your blog) is aimed at other agencies.

As the great Paul Westerberg, of the band The Replacements, once wrote, I’ll tell you what we could do, You be me for a while and I’ll be you. In this scenario, you’re just trading places with each other, talking to yourself, in a sense. If they’re not your prospective clients, billables won’t be coming from those other agencies.

2)No interaction-you automate tweets every 12-24 hours but do nothing else.

3)The biggest obstacles to social media are also the biggest obstacles to new business: time and consistency. While there are limitless amounts of information on social media, too many experts (good and bad) don’t take these constraints into consideration when advising how to be successful in social media.

4) Not enough research up front before diving in. Many of your prospects aren’t using social media at all. In that scenario, you’re wasting your time.

So think about the above reasons above if you’re not getting what you think you should be from social media and ask if any of them apply to you.

Lastly, we were giving a social media presentation last week and one of the principals brought up the elephant in the room: social media ROI, in regards to their own internal efforts to get new business and in the context of their client work.

Well, that’s another post, but the below video, based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, is a great way to answer that question as a first step. If you’ve seen it, it’s worth watching again.

I'm the VP of Sales at RSW/US. We specialize in working with services firms to help drive and close new business-if you need help with that, email me at lee@rswus.com. What I actually do: drive sales efforts to bring ad agencies and services firms on board with RSW, create content around successful new business tactics and help drive RSW/US marketing objectives, including social media channels, blog content, webinars, video and speaking engagements. Dig it.