Social Media - the easy guide to choosing an agency.

Venturing out of Hoxton for the moment..

One of the modus operandi of this blog seems to be as a panacea bullshit. By documenting the travails of a working digital designer in London, i hope to shed some light on some of the insidious and potentially unethical practices that pop up.

I hope that perhaps by actually showing how full of hot air a some of this stuff is, it might go away and we can concentrate on producing good work. The result will hopefully be a re-valuing of priorities so that authorship is now more important than messaging. That a site that does something is more important than a site that can only talk about something.

Most clients are thoroughly unaware of this. They simply choose their agency through a flawed pitch process or by sheer inertia. The incumbent agency stays that we because its easier to keep them. Their goals may be wrong to start with, they think they need a marketing campaign, and go to a marketing agency but the marketing agency is too spineless and greedy to send them to someone who can help them. They are also bamboozled by language and seduced by the sales pitch. They have lost their objective criteria for assessing which agency to choose.

Now we get onto the point of the post, and it is the buzzword du jour of 'social media'. This is the buzzword of the year and ready to spring into action are a burgeoning number of 'social media' agencies that are popping up. They're everywhere, some good, the rest are absolutely hopeless. Its understandable, its a new field and most people see this field as the new gold rush frontier. Agencies quickly try to reinvent themselves to try and stay relevant to their clients. Others will simply buy in that which they cant do. The result is, with all this bullshit flying about, its impossible to tell who is good and who isn't.

Well this guide hopefully will make it easy for you by splitting the agencies in two sorts.

The first sort, we'll call "The Consultants" actually have no one who can produce anything within their immediate group, or at least the people you are dealing with. They may have a design 'arm' they can use, and they may even be part of a larger organisation. However, what you are after are practitioners not talkers. This is key. The "Consultants" are high on talking about it and can suggest 'strategy' and approach but will fail on implementation. They may point to things they do, they may have a blog, they may have some wacky pics they've taken for movember, they're, no doubt, on twitter and they've got a facebook page. Well, they're operating in the field, they must be experts in it? Well..no.

Why aren't they? Well, the reason is clear when we look at the 2nd sort of agency, the good sort:

These are called "The roll year sleeves up and get on with it' mob.

These are the people that actually make the things they are talking about. These are the people who are simply not just active in the social space (anyone can blog...hell, I'm blogging here!) but are actually making THINGS that live in the social space. They make applications, they make stuff that has lasting significance.

The key here is, if the person you are dealing with can produce original content, then he's worth continuing the conversation with. You need people, who not only can talk but can do. Ask the question, "the MD of the company, was he a programmer before he started running this business?" "Was she a designer that actually designed and built things?"

In short, is he/she a practitioner?

These people, and only those people have the intimate knowledge of the medium to make ideas work in this field. These are the people that know how to tell the narratives of social media, and what works, because they've actually done it before. They've actually made web applications, they've built social games and deployed and monetised them on Facebook. They focus on authorship of original content. They can give you a road map and build the road to get you there. Not talk to you about it and suggest a bus to take.

Didn't Sun Tzu say something about 'all warfare being based in deception' - well that's what Charlie Sheen said in Wallstreet!
Well with social media agencies, its a pretty big deception.

Starting next week, I shall scour the internets and find websites of companies who offer 'social media' and shine the harsh "hoxton prophet' light of truth and see how they measure up.