So you are planning to hire an agency for your company’s social media outreach initiatives? Creating a blog, or a social networking site? Easy. An annual plan, aligned with your overall communication goals? Then it becomes tricky. The social media agencies scenario in India is sadly still in its infancy.

I decide to put down my thoughts on this after seeing a good round-up by Gaurav. It made me ponder a bit. He wrote

The Indian players offering social media marketing services can broadly be divided into three categories:

- Digital advertising agencies offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public relations agencies/ practitioners offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent bloggers offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

He has also listed down a few companies that are today engaged in providing social media outreach programmes for its clients. Now when somebody looks at this list, he might wonder which category is best suited for his company. My not-so-perfect take on this is simple:

There’s a media, and there are ways to leverage it for a corporation. In the traditional setup, a corporation would hire an advertising agency to buy ad space on that media and hire a PR firm to engage with the editorial of that media publication. I suppose it wouldn’t be so drastically different when it comes to the social media.

A digital advertising agency today would primarily look at creating blog banners, websites, and applications, while a PR 2.0 agency would look at engaging with relevant bloggers to spread its client’s messaging, and participate in social networking sites and engage with the end consumers.

Both have their weaknesses. While a digital advertising agency might not have the expertise to engage continuously with a client’s target audience, a PR 2.0 agency would lack the technical skills required to say perhaps create a Facebook application.

Now as a corporation, you would probably want to hire a firm that is good in providing both the services.  Why have two different service providers? As PR agencies have been handling your communications programs with other media, you might perhaps want to work with them and combine your traditional media approach with the new media. But is that so simple?

This can be one reason why I could imagine a lot of partnerships between digital advertising agencies and PR 2.0 firms in the near future. This might work out in a way where PR agencies are outsourcing the technical part of the job to application developers and website creators while they take care of the messaging and maintaining a particular property with the target audience.

Also it is interesting to note how PR agencies  are ramping up their processes to offer social media outreach services to their clients. An improvement from my last post – dare I say

Apart from Fleishman Hillard and Edelman that Gaurav mentioned in his post, we have  Weber Shandwick starting its social media division Screengrab in India. Then we have 2020 Media, Redifussion PR, Adfactors PR, and Genesis Burson Marsteller starting their own.

So when all these are happening, the biggest hurdle would be lack of good manpower – professionals who know how to handle the communications of a client as well as understand the social media well. That goes for the another post. Till then let’s wait and watch and smile a bit. What’s you take? Leave a comment.

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