The Marketing Manager's Modern Social Media Drama

What the modern marketing manager goes through when tasked with executing on a “social media” strategy…

Scenario:

1. You work for a company as a marketing manager or you’ve been mandated as the publicist for a corporate account
2. Your boss/client wants you to get the word out about an upcoming brand launch or wants you to manage the continuing marketing efforts of a brand
3. You’re experienced and you know your way around the traditional marketing channels — Secure a television spot? No problem. Get coverage in the dailies? K, done. Secure a feature in a magazine? Piece of cake.
4. Oh wait, your boss just called. She wants you to execute a social media strategy too. — Oh crap.

So what are your choices?

When it comes to executing an online strategy pertaining to social media and social network, you know or think you know what your boss/client wants to have done is:

1. Create a Twitter account
2. Create a Facebook page
3. Get blogger coverage
4. Get online magazine coverage
— Sounds simple enough. You’re on Twitter and/or FB all day long anyways.

Now what really happens next?

And here’s the drama most marketing managers face. You consider:

1. Hiring a digital agency

You’re thinking it might be worth it because there is another accountable corporate entity which now can give you the right metrics by which to gauge your online social media expenditure/budget. Hey, you’d even get pie-charts and graphs, and comparable metrics to justify how well you made the decision to go with ABC Digital Agency at the end of the day.

Problem? It’s not cheap because you’re afterall paying for a whole machinery to go to work for you. Truth be told, you don’t know what you’re paying for since it all sounds so alien at this point. You also just realized that your niece in high school just got an internship at aforesaid digital agency, with responsibilities to.. update the FB and Twitter accounts for clients all day.

2. Hiring a social media guru

You decide that a smaller outfit (i.e. a One-Man-Operation) might be more suitable for your budget and think that if the social media guru is working out of his home and is just surfing the web the whole day, and tweeting/posting facebook status-es, his services should come cheaper. That’s true, it will be less costly simply because an OMO’s overheads are lower but not because he’s less effective.