That is why we do what we do. We will provide traffic to a blog and ultimately to various trackable points on their business website. We all know that it is about conversion. Only ROI matters. But if you don’t provide opportunity quickly, then there will be no conversion or ROI. While we give advice and direction about conversion, that is not our core business model. We refer other firms for that. And we put many many clients in the clean-up spot with the bases juiced.

Jon: Very apt analogy. :)

Tim: All you can do is educate. And then educated some more. But at some point, if they’re not getting it then they need to go out and find another coach. If they don’t want to follow your plays and don’t trust your authority, then why have they hired you? As Rae tweeted, you can take someone else to the playoffs.

Yawn: Excellent advice. And, were you actually on my side for once? :p

The fact of the matter is that ONLY THE CLIENT can manage Social Media strategies, because the ROI metric doesn’t have any value in Social Media. Yet, it’s exactly this metric that’s being farmed out to clients. You can’t manage “emotion” via a third party, and that’s what social media is, “emotion”. What we also know about emotion is that it has a memory, so don’t pi** it off.

“We’ll build for you a campaign of 12,000 followers, and manage your facebook homepage and get you a branded channel on Youtube”.

Blah blah blah blah.

Doesn’t mean diddly. Hey reading client, you’ve got people but no history of how these relationships were formed. You probably don’t even have a written archive of “Tweets” so who knows what you said in 5 years time as society has evolved and your business might have moved on.

SO, my advice and message to big companies is don’t farm this stuff out to agencies. Get consultancy and bring the operation in-doors where you can manage it as part of your overall communications strategy, with all the relevant checks and vettings processes you find across your more traditional forms of outward bound communications.

This isn’t a one-size fits all because there are stories of massive success with Social Media, but the consistent thread that runs across them, is that the people managing the campaigns were a) savvy on social media, and b) managing it themselves.

Happy networking.