So earlier this week a reporter asks what I considered to be “some interesting agency trends?” Aside from the chronic spread of social media expert-itis, oh and some Grade-A Twitter shilling, the one I felt the strongest about was what I’ll just call, for now, the “rise of agency apps.” Net-net, I think we’re starting to see some early signs of agencies developing all sorts of custom-built web apps — each app designed specifically for the way it does business and packaged up as a value-added service/perk for clients and prospects. Converseon’s been doing this for a while now (see “Conversation Miner“), Edelman got in the game too (see “StoryCrafter“), WaggEd as well (see “Twendz“), and yeah, Voce’s keeping in step (see “Bridge“). I think we’ll see a lot more firms roll their own apps this year, probably suites of apps too. Watch this…
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The Rise of Agency Apps
mike manuel
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Social Media “Generalist vs Specialist,” a Tired Debate
mike manuel
Ugh, okay, the “social media generalist vs. specialist” argument is really getting tired, especially within agency circles. I’ve always thought it’s healthier to think of social media experience as a spectrum: on one end you’ll always have the laggards and on the other you’ll always have the early adopters. And it’s the space between these two extremes where the large majority of practitioners sit (i.e., the generalists). As a result, every firm needs its early adopters, it’s specialists, it trail guides to help pull the majority further across the spectrum (while the early adopters themselves continue to push forward and define new experiences, new skills and new boundaries). This being said, why some folks continue to wag their fingers at those agencies that have service teams comprised of early adopters focused on social media is, well, beyond me…
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Phil Gomes
I agree, and I’ll go you one further… Many large-to-mid-sized agencies have, for example, a focused group of national media specialists. We have such a group here (Edelman), and we had one at the 70-person firm where I worked in San Francisco from 2000 - 2002.
Of course, most every practitioner at any firm is expected to have strong media relations skills, but there are certain instances wherein calling in the specialists is advisable and even necessary.
Perhaps not surprisingly, no one feels that this is something to be debated.
Add “digital” or “social media” to the mix, and suddenly it’s supposed to be some burning issue.
So, yes… Loud agreement on this one…
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mike manuel
yeah, truth be told, it’s not really an “agency thing” either, most companies have been organizing people and resources around unique skillsets for decades now, “social media expertise” just being the latest iteration of that…
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Corporate Social Media Must Keep SEC in Mind
mike manuel
The WSJ just posted a piece on clients Intel and eBay, but with a focus on eBay and the story behind its use of Twitter for corporate news. This was actually something I pointed to here a few weeks ago that kicked-up quite a bit of discussion (check out “How to Tweet Material News”). I’ve known Richard Brewer-Hay for years now, he works hard and has the support of some very smart people inside eBay. It’s good to see he and the team leading the way on things and getting a little bit of recognition in the process. It’s well deserved. RBH will be sharing his story inside eBay at two upcoming events, including the NewComm Forum and TWTRCON.
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Social Media Will Lead Interactive Spending
mike manuel
So an upcoming Forrester report (for release, I’m told, later this spring) indicates growth in social media budgets will outpace all other forms of interactive marketing — they even have this colorful chart, so shit, this *must* be true. Now don’t get me wrong, these numbers are all fine and good, but here’s the problem with the data: the dollars for social media programs are coming from *all sorts of pockets* within companies — PR, HR, IT, Web, customer support, etc. — social media programs are by no means the exclusive line item for corporate branding budgets. And you know, generally speaking, I think that’s a healthy thing because we’re still seeing a lot of interesting applications that cross organizational boundaries.-
Andrew_Peel (Andrew Peel)
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UNSEENNTMKTG (Unseen Net Marketing)
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iamkhayyam (Khayyam Wakil)
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edlee (Ed Lee)
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steve_dodd (steve_dodd)
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Mikej
am I missing something…. social media is only a blip on this chart in comparison to Search and Display
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mike manuel
look at the compound annual growth rate for social media, mike…
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Brian Ellefritz
Measuring social media’s growth by spend is like measuring hybrids vs. other cars by average driving speed, seems to me. The magic equalizer would be a normalized ROI/results equivalent for each unit of spend but of course that doesn’t exist.
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Dear Social Media Monitoring Companies…
mike manuel
Here’s the problem, guys: when it comes to large-scale *online response* programs, too many of you are trying to shoehorn people into systems that don’t gel with the variety of workflows that are naturally found when, you know, silly humans get involved. Some people will dig your bookmarklet, others your dashboard, and still some your email alerts and feeds, but none of them will like *all* of these things, and I can guarantee you all of them will use more than one — so yeah, that makes your job very, very difficult. And your products, well, either loved or hated.
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Tom Biro
Are companies REALLY surprised about this? As someone who’s now evaluated these packages at two spots, and gone through the rigamarole (sp?) with people all over the place, with different experience, different opinions, and so on, I wholeheartedly agree and am shocked to hear that a vendor might not “get” that just yet.
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mike manuel
yeah, the challenge, as you know, is just that response work is half technology/half workflow. it feels sometimes like everyone’s trying to throw more technology at the problem, when the workflow half has yet to be really figured out.
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Mike Spataro
I’d like to discuss this with you and get your front-line feedback from your customers. Obviously, in an emerging market like this it’s always going to be a work in progress to figure out how to deploy any platform that meets the various workflow and response needs of all different types of businesses and internal groups. This is an area where I spend about 85% of my time with clients nowadays so I’d welcome the chance to explore this more with you (and Tom). There are some very fundamental differences in how brands approach this area and the differences are very unique depending on which part of an organization you are trying to help, especially at an enterprise level. You are dead-on though that this has much more to do with laying the groundwork for a successful plan and approach than it does with any tool and technology, which is why we have established a specialty in this area that is independent of the application. I’d welcome the opportunity to exchange war stories with you on this at any time.
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mike manuel
always happy to talk, mike; your team at visible and the guys at radian6 have always shown you’re adept at using your own technology and tools for listening and poking back at the marketplace when it speaks up. if nothing else, it shows you understand the challenges companies face — case in point, you not only found this post, but knowing timelines is of the essence, you left this comment on a sunday. dave alston at radian6 reached out yesterday on email. both efforts are impressive.
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Brian Ellefritz
Mike seems to have a good perspective on this. As a social media practitioner on the client side (Cisco) I can affirm that even within a single company there is a wide spectrum of readiness for different response strategies. Some are way back at listening and risk management and dashboards are reasonable to them; others are well along on response and outreach management strategies and could use alerts, routing or better simple tools. Still the most robust tools seem to have a lot more utility than we can take advantage of as we sort through organization and role conversations for this new responsibility.
I think the tools vendors are poorly suited to counsel clients on PROCESS, ROLES, etc. just for scalability reasons. Seems to me like that’s an agency opportunity. My 2 cents.
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mike manuel
no argument here, brian, the later (triage, process, etc.), that’s where i’m investing my energy and time these days. as i see it, monitoring and response work it’s really less of a tech problem now, and more of a workflow/adaptation challenge. where i keep going sideways with the big brand monitoring firms is the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to this problem…
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The Inefficiency of Social Media
mike manuel
So one of the big headaches that comes with social media inside large companies is that you often have too many departments that are each operating various platforms and activities, most of which have feedback channels enabled (comments, messaging systems, etc). So, true story: a large business software company had a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel — all of which were being run through different departments — and all of which were receiving AND answering the same exact questions (sometimes from the same people) in all four places. I mean, I’m all for good customer service, folks, but this is a great example of good intentions working against your business. And it’s exactly this sort of thing that amplifies the challenge of decentralized strategies and programs.
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Old Practices Still Apply to New Tech
mike manuel
It’s funny how the presence of new technologies and tools can sometimes oddly distract marketing and PR folks from really good, time-tested methodologies and practices. Case in point, the frequency at which I have to each week pull people back down to reality with fundamental questions like “what’s your objective?,” “what are you hoping to accomplish?” is, well, surprising. There’s something about social media that sparks peoples imaginations, in the best sort of way, I just wish I was less often the guy holding a big bucket of cold water.
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Social Media Expert-itis
mike manuel
For as much as I and others I know bitch and moan about the recent spread of social media expert-itis, the truth is 1). we’re jaded; and 2). what we’re seeing is just another marketing discipline take shape while its practitioners awkwardly, elbow, fit and fuss their way to the marketplace table. Some will say it’s for the better, others for the worse, but in the end, like every other discipline, there will simply be a spectrum of people who “do” social media work. Everyone will call and consider themselves “experts,” but the marketplace will decide who can actually make a living doing so…
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Tac Anderson
Yes, welcome to the main stream :)
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Middle Blogging
mike manuel
Alright, so I’m beginning a bit of an experiment here, my thoughts being this: short-form publishing, be it status updates, tweets or otherwise, are, at best, partial thoughts, opinions and insights, but too often, they’re stripped of context and meaning for brevity’s sake — and what you’re left with is, well, an empty candy shell without the yummy chocolaty filling. And on the flip side, long-form publishing, like this here blog, just requires a level of attention and time — mine and yours — so, net-net, a double-tax for both of us. So, this experiment asks: is there a yet to be used middle between the macro and the micro publishing models? I really have no idea, let’s find out…
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Stephen
I like this idea. Watching the experiment with interest.
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Tac Anderson
This is kind of what you see happening on FriendFeed. Of course it’s also kind of what blogging started off like WAY back in the day. Personally Mike, I’ll take any kind of blogging I can get from you. Whatever works for you man.
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mike manuel
thanks tac, i’ll see how this goes.
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Welcome to Voce Chris Thilk
mike manuel
So my colleague Josh Hallett just posted the news that we’ve hired Chris Thilk, and yeah, to say the least, everyone on our team is very fired up to be working with him.
Chris was one of the early social media strategists at MWW Group, working with folks like Tom Biro on the Nikon and Samsung accounts and really helped shape what became the DialogueMedia digital division. For a long time now, Chris has also been the guy behind the guy blogging at Movie Marketing Madness. I think Josh said it best with:
“[We've] always had a list of folks in the industry that we really respect. Folks that walk the walk, more than they talk the talk, and Chris Thilk is one of them.”
It’s true. While there’s no shortage of social media experts these days, finding people who actually have solid experience managing both the strategic and tactical parts of big brand social media programs, is, well, almost impossible to find. With Chris, we found both. And he’s already busy working on Comcast, Intel and a few client wins we’ve yet to talk about.
The addition and news of Chris marks the first in a sequence of announcements we have quietly in the works. More to come…
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How to Tweet Material News
mike manuel
So here’s the deal: if you work for a public company and are interested in extending the application and use of Twitter for corporate news — this post is for you.
So late last week, our (Voce’s) client at eBay, Richard Brewer-Hay, decided to share the backstory on something eBay’s PR and legal teams have been chewing on for a few months now — and that’s the development of guidelines and a set of SEC disclosure best practices that outline how eBay (well, any public company, really) can successfully (err, legally) use Twitter to share material news.
If you read Richard’s post, you’ll see these guidelines were born out of his desire (and his history) of using eBay’s corporate Twitter account to “live tweet” the company’s quarterly earnings calls — something that’s been increasingly catching the attention of industry influencers, media, enthusiasts, etc, who wouldn’t otherwise have participated or tuned in to the actual earnings calls. And yes, as Richard indicates, this activity also, for better or worse, caught the attention of eBay’s corporate IR, PR and legal teams.
It turns out, this was for the better…
The easy, protectionist response would have been to just stop doing this, shut down the account and move on. But thankfully it didn’t, instead, the IR/PR/Legal groups within eBay all came together to figure out a way that concerns regarding disclosure and cautionary statements — especially pertaining to quarterly earnings calls — could all be addressed with the development of this simple legal page (which is now a permanant extension of eBay’s corporate blog, eBay Ink), and maybe more interesting, I think, are the ‘twitter sized’ (140-character) disclosure statements they co-developed. You can read them here.
While we all wait for the SEC to further bake its guidance for disclosure on the web, something it introduced at a surface-level last July, I believe what eBay’s done here might help shape and inform the SEC’s thinking in the interim, as well as provide other public companies with a good working model for material disclosure via emerging practices, like microblogging, livestreaming and the like…
Update: Domnic Jones of IR Web has some sound counter points regarding the archival of earnings information, be it in a company’s Twitter stream or otherwise. Shel Holtz also captures both eBay’s and IR Web’s perspectives on this news in episode #429 of For Immediate Release (show notes here).
Update 2: PRWeek just posted this short piece on the news.
Update 3: Man, this one’s evolving quickly. Yesterday, eBay put its new Twitter disclosure guidelines to work as part of its Analyst Day. IR Web has a great recap of that effort. As does PRWeek (again).
Update 4: The WSJ makes mention of eBay’s use of the web and Twitter.
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tacanderson (Tac Anderson)
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prblog (Kevin Dugan)
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alanweinkrantz (Alan Weinkrantz)
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beetweets (Brenna Sowder)
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wvpmc (Wendy Van Parys)
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SamMoreira (Sam Moreira)
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Make the Jump: RFP love, Snuggie, & Facebooking Mayors « PR Musings Weblog
[...] How to Tweet Material News by Mike Manuel - ‘So here’s the deal: if you work for a public company and are interested in extending the application and use of Twitter for corporate news — this post is for you. [...]
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McDiarmid (McDiarmid)
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Links: 3/15/09 : tombiro.com
[...] Manuel had a great item this week about using Twitter for material news, when you’re a public company. It’s something I’ve had a huge fascination with, [...]
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Community Platforms vs. Community Consultants
mike manuel
Alright, as if there wasn’t enough confusion in the marketplace right now regarding community-building tools, techniques and technicians, we now have the platform makers up-selling ‘community consulting services’ with their wares, and that has left many a company scratching its head and asking…
So, uh, what exactly is the difference between a platform provider’s consulting services, versus, say, an independent consultant’s?
A few months ago, in an effort to help a client of mine find this line and answer this question, I took a crack at a version of the following comparison chart. Was it helpful? Yeah, I think so. Is it exhaustive? Nah, frankly, I think it’s really just scratching the surface of things, but let me know what you think and what your experience has been on either side of the chart here, and maybe it’s something worth iterating further….
Update: A great related post on community managers, and that thing they do, from Brian Oberkirch.
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Itay Banner
Hi Mike,
You’re quite right in differentiating between CPPs and CCs, but I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to your criticism of the CPP consulting services.
In my opinion. CPPs and CCs complement each other. The CPP can consult on how best to integrate their product, or how to best make use of it. They will probably have a more in-depth knowledge of their product than CCs.
While I share your view on CCs having a much broader scope and eyesight, They sometimes are not fully aware of important nuances. For example, how to tweak a certain product for better use.
Other than that - Thanks for sharing your insights here. The latest rise in your Feedburner stats is probably me :-)
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Rob Key 12:23 pm on April 29, 2009 Permalink |
Hi Mike - -good perspective. Our view over at Converseon is that technology and communications have become so intertwined that the “agencies of the future” need strong development skills. It’s no longer “are you a services or technology company?” It’s both. They’re inextricably intertwined. Im sure we’ll be seeing much more out of agencies like Voce and Converseon over time. Appreciate your insights.
Stephen 11:43 pm on April 29, 2009 Permalink |
I’m not sure. If there’s a viable and robust third-party solution then why not use that?
It’s the PR person’s job to make sense of the data not gather it.
mike manuel 1:48 pm on April 30, 2009 Permalink |
why does it have to be an “either-or”? i still use paid services and tools where it makes sense, but in those places where the paid services and tools fall short (or don’t exist), i think there’s a *huge* advantage to be gained through a little innovation…
mark bjornsgaard 1:42 am on April 30, 2009 Permalink |
I couldn’t agree less - software from agencies like KMP (press room) and the ones you mentioned are all light weight, poorly designed (and built) with no long term dev. plans or strategy - in the case of press room why do we need an application to distribute the same, bland press release onto multiple platforms - do we really think it’ll fool google? isn’t that what links are going to do?
why do businesses, with strategic anchors based in servicing clients marketing needs, think they can become tech. development agencies - its the quickest way to bankrupcy
these are good examples not of technology, but of agencies scrabbling for a different business model cos they know the lick and stick they’ve done (and over charged for) for the last 10 years isn’t going to keep the lights on anymore!
very much enjoy your blog btw…
mike manuel 1:51 pm on April 30, 2009 Permalink |
in the immortal words of my patron saint ron burgundy: “let’s agree to disagree,” mark…
JMaultasch (JMaultasch) 5:46 pm on May 6, 2009 Permalink |
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The Rise of Agency Apps [link to post]