The Engaged Consumer

Recently I’ve been thinking more about (and working on) how Powered, as a social marketing provider that focuses on building online communities for brands, can expand our partnerships with those brands’ marketing agencies. In an earlier post, I broke down the question of whether or not agencies can evolve into social. In that post I mentioned a lot of ways that agencies will choose to drive that evolution – with a partnering strategy being one of the major approaches.

For brands – who are really focused on delivering results in the most cost-efficient way possible today – the goal with any partner approach is to drive a social marketing offering where multiple cooperative partners in the social space can deliver more value than they would individually.

A useful metaphor for how this might be done is the world of investing. After all, social marketing is about brands investing in relationships in ways that they can’t do through more traditional marketing channels. But these investments can take many forms.

Any good investor will tell you that diversification is key. You must not only invest in short term vehicles (like stocks) that can be more rewarding but are also riskier, you must also make sure you putting money into long term vehicles. Additionally, the interaction between these short term and long term investments is important to building wealth. Gains made in stocks must occasionally be funneled into longer term vehicles and locked down.

I see the world of social media the same way. Ultimately, storytelling and the production of compelling media – the ability to connect emotionally with a consumer while fitting into the current media and market environment – takes the skill and experience of a great agency. Here are some recently highlighted offline examples from the world of Outdoor advertising.

This “Day Trader” of the social media world knows how to place the right bets, which tools/networks to place them in, how to get the message just right, and the right process for spinning them up with online and offline media/search buys. His or her world is dynamic, and changes every day based on moves in technology, competitor activities, audience preferences, and hundreds of other variables.

Because of that changing world, the focus is on the near term and the strategies are campaign-oriented. They have to be, as the campaign that works today might not work tomorrow.The focus is on creativity, customization, agility, trendspotting, leveraging various technologies, short term measurement, joining instead of building, and exploration.

The good campaigns will be heavily rewarded: with consumer attention, affinity, word-of-mouth buzz, loyalty, and new business. But where will those earnings go when that Day Trader has to move on to the next campaign?

This is where the Investment Manager comes in, the person who keeps a long view and helps leverage the riches that the Day Trader produces into long term wealth. In social marketing, this is the community provider – and with that provider are the people that manage the marketing assets where fans and customers can engage over the long term with brands and with each other. This is who creates and manages a brand’s 401k. The focus is on infrastructure, sustained processes, long-run measurement, building instead of joining, and content with a long lifespan.

These skill sets are both highly necessary, highly complementary, and difficult to perform at a high level simultaneously – which makes them fit a partner model well. Also, the long-term vehicle of community is the newer piece, and part of an agency’s evolution into social is to understand how it works, and how it complements, their work.