Social Media Agency - Hall of Shame winner

For those who missed my rant about how to choose a decent social media agencies, well you can read it here. However, on the back of that I am going to cruise the social media agency landscape and every week or so name and shame those whose appearance seems to be nothing but a agency trying to hitch their wagon to the latest marketing fad.

So....The inaugural award goes to:

TwentySix Social Media - http://www.twentysixsocialmedia.com/

I am sure they are great people there. but honestly, they look exactly like the people to avoid. Take a quick look at their site. Firstly, its small, 4 sections, that's about it.

The first red flag is the services section.

They only do three things:
Monitoring services
Strategy
Implementation


Such broad headings, well, its a sure sign that they're not even sure themselves. The reason? Its not becuase social media is new, its because they're not at the pointy end of execution. They talk about it about doing it, rather than doing it. Take note of the fairly prominent "Social Media Seminars"

I cant see any expertise in execution. They may be able to tell you about social media on a really superficial way. But I can see no expertise here in executing work within the realm of social media. No evidence that the principles have first hand involvement in telling the stories in the space you want to tell them.

Next take a look at their blog...

1) They link to other peoples work. Curatorial blogging isn't new, but you don't gain credibility showing what the tech guys at google do. If I was a client, I would want to hire people that can do the work the tech guys at Google do, not the ones who can only blog about it. What does this say about them as an organisation, that they can report but not create?

2) They talk about their passion, 'why they love digital', but what have they produced to back that up? Having a passion for something isn't enough, where is their credibilty born from the hard slog of authorship. What have they crafted? What have they made? Who cares if they own iphones, they should have iphones...but where is there android phone? And they should be coding in objective-c and java themslves and have an app there for you to download. Where is that?

3) They tell whimsical tales of spoons in the kitchen...enough said.

3) They talk a lot about what social media is "connections between people' 'not a fad' , they talk about being in the 'social space themselves' but all they do is blog. Hey does that make me an expert on social media?...hell, I run 4 blogs! I post more than their ENTIRE company....

Anyway, rant over. TwentySixMedia.....congratulations!