Smash Summit

photo: dancingwithwords

Social Media. Social Media Manager. Social Media Strategist. Social Media Agency. Which is right for you? Today, companies can no longer afford to deny the importance of social media marketing, and take hold of their brand’s voice. While managing a social media campaign should be considered an integral part of every company’s marketing and PR efforts, it can require more work than you think. Directing the discussion surrounding your brand is increasingly important, but you have to trust the right people.

Many companies believe that they have to hire in-house social media managers (or “strategists”) to oversee these efforts. These individuals typically hire and work with a social media agency to develop, coordinate and implement a social media marketing campaign. But, in a case where the agency is creating and spreading content, it might not be as important to have someone in-house as your social media manager. Below, we’ll take a look at several reasons why marketing executives may want to rethink their hires, and instead outsource this increasingly important responsibility to real specialists who know what needs to be done, and have the tools to get them done. Or, of course, when you find that the fundamentals are in place and you need someone on social media 40+ hours per week for your brand, how to go about hiring the right person.

1. The Money

The most obvious reason why a company would avoid hiring an in-house social media manager is in order to save on expenses. While hiring an additional employee will not set a larger company back in a noticeable way, for startups, or for companies with lean social media budget allocations, an in-house social media manager can be an unnecessary expense. For the former, a co-founder in a marketing role can just as effectively give directives to the social media agency. For the latter, when social media marketing budgets are lean (vis-à-vis other avenues of PR or marketing), the money used to pay for an in-house manager equates to money that is being taken away from the social media campaign, which could be better used to retain additional services of a social media agency, to increase the level of engagement, or to be re-allocated to other important business development projects.

2. No one Likes Redundancy.

If a business hires for an in-house social media role, they are essentially hiring someone to serve as a liaison between the marketing director (or CMO), and representatives at the contracted social media agency. In effect, this person would serve as an intermediary between the two specialists: one that knows what is needed; and the other that knows how to get it done. Some could argue that such a role is merited, because the marketing director is too busy to worry about the social media side of marketing the business. To this argument, we’d say that this is exactly the type of marketing director that does not understand social media marketing, and thus would benefit from a close, working relationship with their social media agency. Further, and even more importantly, communication is streamlined – the agency is able to get immediate answers on new projects and budgets from the marketing director (or CMO) and to trust that their projects and initiatives are being approved by someone with the authority to do so.

The fact that a company needs to hire based on their social media needs, is evidence that they do not know exactly what they are doing (which isn’t a bad thing in itself). With that said, bringing someone into the mix unnecessarily can also result in delays (waiting for approval on projects), lulls in conversation and miscommunication (nuanced expectations). These are the characteristics of an unsuccessful social media campaign. Don’t give your outside contractors and agencies too many gatekeepers and/or conflicting creative feedback.

3. Get your Marketing Director more involved

By having an outside agency report directly to the marketing director, you will ensure that the agency (which should be comprised of seasoned exports) is not micromanaged (they hate this). Any marketing director will invariably be more concerned with establishing success metrics than a social media manager would be. Once metrics are established, the marketing director should hold the agency accountable to promptly report on progress towards goals each month. As was mentioned above, by having your marketing director working closely with an agency, the marketing director will learn about and stay abreast of what is working in social media. Because the director will not be micromanaging a campaign, but rather overseeing its overall efforts, the agency will be able to remain creative. The marketing director can step in if necessary – to make sure that the brand’s integrity remains intact, for example, and to ensure that everything checks out with the legal department if necessary or possibly controversial.

4. Disadvantages?

Of course there are disadvantages to sourcing your social media campaign to a social media agency: they will not live, eat, breathe and sleep your brand, in the same way that someone internally (hopefully) would do. An in-house social media manager may seem more of a brand evangelist on the surface, and want to see the company succeed for the sake of their own job security among other things. If they do not have equity, they at least will want to keep their job. In the same way, you can overcome what could be seen as this lack of love for the brand, by tying a portion of an agency’s engagement to performance. People respond to incentives, and accountability is key.

5. When Should You Bring Someone In-house?

At a certain point in the process, with a presence established across multiple social sites, you will have multiple campaigns and more people involved. For example, at the beginning of your campaign you barely had a blog set up, but after a couple of years, your company has grown, your product has launched, and people are talking about you on Twitter. The team that managed and promoted your blog content and showed you how to set up the Twitter account and grow it in the first place might not have quite as much incentive (or time) to respond to every single Tweet to protect your brand. At the stage when you want to expand to create videos, have budget for big viral campaigns, want multiple in-depth blog articles per day AND you need to engage tens of thousands of fans and followers, you might want to have someone there in your office alongside you. Make sure that your vetting process runs deeper than confirming that their Twitter profile says “social media guru/ninja/consultant/strategist/hero” and look at how they have established a social media presence for themselves or their previous employers and/or clients (and on which sites – are they relevant to your brands goals?).

In Conclusion…

Ultimately, the goal is to get the right combination of someone who knows what they are doing with the most streamlined communication possible, at a price that works for your company. If, for you, that means putting someone in a chair for $40k-80k/year to relay your emails/directives to a social media agency or to (if you are lucky) have the skill-set to execute the campaigns internally, and your company is in a position to pay them, then go for it. If you find someone who really gets it and your company culture in relatively insular and you want to have some live and breathe your brand day and night, that might be the best fit for you (but be prepared to pay for the best talent, and in some cases they will definitely be worth it, especially if you are a large, established brand with a lot of years of brand equity on the line and an existing fan/customer base to engage). However, if you are running on early VC money and you want to keep things lean and mean, cut out the middleman, set expectations early and get a personal recommendation from one of your advisers or a trusted friend who has worked first hand with an outside social media agency or freelancer.

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