During a panel discussion I made the point that social media transcends marketing for most organizations, and is (or will be) an integral part of most organizations’ operations and core business strategy. I gave the example of the Federal government, where I am seeing management consulting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) taking the lead, not marketing or advertising firms. In fact, I would argue that consulting firms like BAH are in the best position to address social media and how to best harness it.

The weakness consulting firms have is that they do not have “in the trenches” experience developing and managing earned media programs – which is at the heart of any effect social media program.

PR and traditional agencies lack the technical chops to really handle the “implementation” and technical production (think social apps, etc.) side of social media. At least traditional ad agencies understand and are capable of developing the big ideas that should be the foundation of any great social media program.

The knock on digital agencies is that they get too caught up on the technology and production side, and can’t see the forest for the trees…

Bottom line is that no one can effectively lay claim to social media, except maybe savvy companies like BestBuy and jetBlue that are doing just fine without a lot of outside consultants…

If you haven’t heard, Twitter announced on Monday 4/12 that they will be rolling out their first paid advertising platform to begin monetizing their mammoth micromedia platform. The service is being called “Promoted Tweets”, and will initially be launched as promotional tweets that show up on Twitter.com search results. It’s the first step in a multi-stage roll-out, so there is definitely more to come, including the possibility of “Promoted Tweets” becoming a free tweet, as described by the NYTimes.com.

This is an exciting development to say the least. But don’t think that “Promoted Tweets” or whatever it evolves into will be the next Google AdWords. In fact, according to Augie Ray of Forrester, there are many risks associated with inapproriate use of paid Twitter ads, including public backlash against perceived “bully pulpit” tactics by brands.

Augie summarizes what this all means for the commercial use of Twitter by astutely noting that “this may be paid media, but it is a few drops of paid media in a sea of earned media.”

While an iPhone app is very emotionally appealing to most people, in many cases starting with a mobile Web site makes more sense.

John Arnold of Entrepreneur.com has written a nice piece laying out the pros & cons of mobile apps vs. mobile Web sites.

I would even go a little farther than Arnold is saying that starting with a mobile Web site makes the most sense for most companies. As Arnold states in his article, extending an existing Web site to be mobile-accessible is much easier, less time consuming and expensive than launching an app, particularly if your site is running on a CMS (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc). That, coupled with the tough decision of which platform to focus on (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, etc.), points to starting with a mobile Web site.

While there are exceptions to every rule, I feel the “test and learn” approach afforded by going mobile Web site first makes the most sense.

Our panel will feature:

Todd Van Etten, Republican National Committee
Paris Dennard, Republican National Committee
Darian Rafie, bep Interactive
Danny Allen, Sensis

The session will be on Monday, March 15, at 9:30 AM in the Hilton, Room C.  It should be really interesting and a lot of fun, so come check it out.

Hash tag for the panel is pretty unfortunate (#digirebrandrepubparty).  I didn’t make it up, it was assigned by the SXSW folks.

This is the first time I’ve been to SXSW since 1991, so I’m really looking forward to it.  If you’re there and want to drop me a line I’m at @dannyallenjr.

In the mean time, the godfather of social CRM is Paul Greenberg.  To get yourself up to speed on the basics, you should read his two posts on his CRM Forecast 2010.  The posts are here at Part I and Part II.

Another cool thing about Wharton BizTech, was that I got to meet MC Hammer, who was the morning keynote speaker.  He is surprisingly sharp when it comes to speaking about social media and the future of marketing, and has a pretty amazing fanbase on Twitter.  Follow him at @MCHammer.

The digital campaign ends on a positive note, with solid results, and you put together some kind of wrap-up or “post-mortem” report summarizing how the campaign performed. Included in the report are all kinds of metrics, ranging from CPMs, to effective CPCs to potentially CPL (cost per lead) and/or CPA (cost per acquisition) analyses. After going through the results and explaining what everything means, and maybe even after supplying some industry benchmarks to provide a point of reference, you get a response something like this:

“this is great, be we were actually hoping to see a lower eCPC”

or maybe this

“thanks for the report, but we were expecting a lower CPA than what the campaign produced.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve been involved in launching, managing and reporting on online advertising campaigns for more than 9 years, and I have consistently seen this type of response from clients (particularly newer ones). Recently, after receiving a similar response, someone from our team had the courage to ask the client what results they seen from some of their traditional media buys for the same campaign. The client responded “oh, we don’t know what that produced.”

So why the higher expectations for digital media?

On the other hand, I think about the incredible complexity of the digital strategy world and the trend towards specialization and wonder if merging the Planner and Digital Strategist is feasible? For instance, with the rise of unique digital areas of specialty / expertise such as information architecture, user experience planning, analytics and social media, the role of digital strategist appears to to be too much of a simplification and generalist position out of sync with the rapid changes in digital communications?

What do you think?

We hope that our new look and layout will make the site easier to navigate, search, and comment on (and we definitely encourage your comments and feedback!)

Stay tuned as we begin rolling out new blog posts on the ever changing world of digital marketing and it’s intersection with traditional advertising.

Regards,

Jose Villa

Check it out here: http://www.thinkmulticultural.com/2009/11/05/twitter-land-grab/

1^st Place: Third Jack-o-Lantern from the left “Super Mario” by Rachel, Aretta, and Eric

2^nd Place: All the way on the right, “Dia de los Muertos” by Diego

3^rd Place: All the way on the left “Chonga Cat” by Isa and Diana

4^th Place: Second from the left, “Rats Nest” by Nicole and Genesis

Congrats to Rachel, Aretta and Eric!