How to Choose a Social Media Marketer

Here is a 10-point checklist for choosing a social media marketer. 

1.    Has the person built an online community before?  How many people participated and how did they interact with each other? 

2.    How long has the person been working with user-generated content?  What kind of content and how much have they worked with, and how intimately?

3.    Small, independent, highly interactive web communities offer marketers excellent learning experiences.  Check the marketer’s client list for attributes like connecting community members with each other, helping members find content online, helping members build a repository of quality content (not junk content), and viral success.

4.    Be on the lookout for buzzwords used to make a marketer sound more social-media savvy than s/he really is.  Rather than listening for keywords like tagging, Facebook, WOMM, Digg, blogging, and Twitter, listen for concepts like fostering community interaction, facilitating discovery, relinquishing control, open culture, application platforms, and reputation building.

5.    Being a participant in a user-generated content community is not the same as building or running one.  Does the marketer have community management experience?

6.    Some social-media savvy folks don’t have commensurate experience working with corporate clients.  Make sure your marketer can understand your needs as well as the social media scene.

7.    Web design or online publishing experience is not equivalent to social media experience.  Social media is people communicating amongst themselves, not just visiting a site that’s made by professionals.

8.    Corporate messaging experience is not a selling point for social media expertise.  The more corporate messaging experience your marketer has, the worse they may be at social media advice.

9.    Don’t be fooled by a blue-chip client list.  Big-name clients are still less likely to have cutting edge social media strategies, so this isn’t a case where “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” applies. 

10.    Work directly with the expert, as opposed to with someone who works for the expert.

Comments

[Isabel Hilborn]

This post relates to one I wrote in December: http://blog.isabelhilborn.com/2007/12/why-you-should.html

[francois gossieaux]

Hi Isabel,

I left the following comment on Alan's blog, which triggered your response here...I thought it was relevant to this ongoing conversation:
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I am not sure I like the label “social media marketer”…

Social media has changed the way that buyers behave and provided new challenges and opportunities to marketers. But the primary goal of any marketer is still what it was when Peter Drucker defined it as “creating a customer.”

Unfortunately there are too many marketers who have not yet realized how social media has rocked their world - and who are considering social media as another media channel.

And unfortunately (squared), there are too many so-called social media experts who have no clue what marketing is all about and are being zealots about how marketers are not getting it.

Some, if not most/all, of the Cluetrain authors truly understood both sides of the equation…but many late adopters of the cluetrain manifesto do not.

So back to the original premise - if the purpose of a company is to create a customer, and the only two things that matter in achieving this are marketing and innovation (again - according to Drucker), there is no need for a “social media marketer.” What companies need is someone who truly understands how to “create a customer,” and how the social media platform of participation changed all the rules to make that happen…

[Isabel Hilborn]

Francois, you're so right - I just took the phrase "social media marketer" from Adam's post without thinking. And by the way I forgot to note that it was Adam Broitman's post that inspired me to write this.

http://amediacirc.us/2008/07/29/can-anyone-be-a-social-media-marketer/

What I should have said above is "how to choose a social media consultant". Marketing is a word that has been severely misunderstood, and particularly in some of the most interesting social communities it is a dirty word. So I think given the choice between social media and marketer I'd choose to lose "marketer".

I like your comment but there is so much more to a company than "creating a customer". Just ask all the autoworkers who are losing their jobs, or the people who live downstream from that company that dumps in the river, or the homeless guy that gets a free cup of coffee from the local diner. Community goes way beyond "the transaction" - as I know both you and Peter Drucker intuitively understand.

[Edward Vielmetti]

Iz -

When I reread this, I wonder about whether there are really two roles that are out there, and how there are differences that have to be matched up to make them sensible.

Some set of what you describe falls in some traditional roles under "community relations", and typically this is seen as some kind of public relations role; you're not trying to score new customers, but rather to keep the customer satisfied.

A second set of things creeps out of marketing into the advertising world, and then you are doing "social network advertising", where customer acquisition is the right metric.

Community relations looks like a cost of doing business, and is measured by things like customer churn; customer acquisition gets measured in cost per acquisition and you creep into the world of Google adwords.

Elements of this "social media marketing" fit into both roles! But in one case you get measured by keeping the customer satisfied, and in the other you get measured by new leads and new business. The metrics are different ,the tactics and strategies are different, and heaven help you if you think you are in one role but get measured by the other.

[Iz]

I think this is worth ongoing discussion - getting and keeping customers should not have two separate departments but should be directly related. They both should be about how great your product is! Imagine being led to a company with promises of a particular product, and then being disappointed once there. Should the company start all over again to keep you? With the amount of public discussion over products and services online today, "prosumers" are influenced to become or remain a customer through very similar data streams, right?