Comments on: Can Social Media Be Outsourced?

By: Chris Schmitt

Chris Schmitt — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:53:08 +0000

An effective social media campaign requires an understanding of your customers values. How and why would you want to outsource that? It’s akin to outsourcing your company’s marketing strategy; no, it’s worse than that. How can you hope to partner and engage with your customer if you pay someone else to do it?

You can outsource tactical things like tools, training and measurement. But outsourcing the interaction will be seen as artificial and will ultimately backfire.

By: Should you outsource social media? | Sherrilynne Starkie

Should you outsource social media? | Sherrilynne Starkie — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:18:35 +0000

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By: Robinsh

Robinsh — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:28:51 +0000

Social media can boost your business and life but depends upon how to use it how to manage it, many of us are aware about it but forget to use it as a professional.

By: ElizabethL

ElizabethL — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:55:17 +0000

If companies aren’t familiar with social media they shouldn’t try to dive into it themselves. It’s not just posting tweets, and checking facebook. It takes a professional.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:30:31 +0000

Good post. I reached a similar conclusion to you before embarking on a consultancy role. Even if clients could be convinced about the benefit of outsourcing their engagement, before long they would see this approach as less cost-effective, more hassle and too shallow. Even if a hypothetical outsourced social media team were fantastic and cheap, someone client-side will eventually turn up who is a huge fan of social and wants to get in on the action. There’s a difficult future for any social media agency (or consultant) that thinks they can follow this model.

The clear exception is monitoring and analysis – which is time-consuming and requires more specialist skills than engagement (which, as you quite rightly point out, requires above all transparency, honesty and passion).

Also, don’t ignore the need for social “productions” (e.g. events, assets), campaigns and pre-existing networks.

By: David Jones

David Jones — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:14:55 +0000

I tell clients it’s possible in the short term, but the longer term goal should be to hire or integrate these skills inside the organization. Monitoring, measurement, strategic counsel, etc. can always be outsourced, but I agree that the day-to-day community management is best handled from inside a company.