Never ever outsource your social media. Ever.

Never ever outsource your social media. Ever.

This post originally appeared on the Equinet Media blog

 

never outsource your social mediaEpisode 7 of The Social Media Show dealt with the question of whether organisations should outsource their social media to a third party agency.

This topic always sparks a healthy debate. I’m going to tell you why you should never do it. Never, never, never… Ever!

Ok. Hands up. I admit it. This headline is a bit of a sensationalistic attention-grabber. But in my defence, it is a reaction to seeing yet another agency offering to handle all of their clients social media for them (including tweeting daily jokes and proverbs!).

I’m sure you’ve come across that before - agencies saying they will “do” social media for organisations, completely manage their social efforts on their behalf.

Heck, you may even have been thinking about seeking this sort of service out yourself. In some ways, this is completely understandable. You have a lot of things done for you by agencies – PR, media buying, creative, planning, copywriting, etc. It feels natural to treat social media that way too. Resist it.

Human

If we’ve learned one thing about social media by this point it’s that it is a human activity at its heart. That in order to “do it right”, for it truly to be effective, we have to be able to make a genuine connection with people. The new authenticity demanded by the social era means consumers no longer will stand for the prototypical corporate façade of old. If they want to connect on social media with your company, they want it to be a real connection.

It’s difficult enough to create a personality for a @corporateXYZ account, for example. There seems to be an immediate and unavoidable barrier erected by the use of the company name and logo in the profile, rather than the name of a real person (or even a pseudonym). But if you add a third party agency into the mix, who necessarily will be forced to impersonate the company, achieving authenticity and connection becomes almost impossible.

Knowledge

In addition to that near impossibility there is the question of knowledge. Customers (and other important people) increasingly use social media to find information, especially, but not exclusively, in the B2B world. Being able to answer technical questions, to dip into forums and user groups, to write convincing, accurate, authoritative content requires an in-depth knowledge of the company and its products or services. An external agency, especially one that has its hands full with many clients, will struggle to ever gain the necessary knowledge and authority.

Action

And speaking of questions and authority, what will the agency do if there is a customer complaint? Would you feel comfortable giving whichever agency staffer is covering your account at the time the power to deal with an angry customer? In a public space? With who-knows-who watching?

Or instead, will the agency need to phone you or send you an email asking you how they should handle the issue? How inefficient and delaying is that? Meanwhile, the customer, who in this social age expects an immediate response, sits fuming or worse complaining even more emphatically.

Co-sourcing

But Eric, I hear you say, I have some serious reasons to consider outsourcing my social media; I don’t have the time, the people, or the knowledge.

And those are good reasons, Matilda. I agree. Social media done effectively requires resource and expertise. It is around these areas where an agency can help. But not through outsourcing.

Perhaps “outsourcing” is the wrong word. It conjures up images of call centre-style outposts populated by interchangeable, anonymous (wretched) workers. Perhaps we need a more appropriate term. I think a better term (and model) is “co-sourcing”, where the company uses the agency to work with them, to support them, to take up the effort where they can’t.

The agency still has to understand the company as deeply as possible and has to work closely with the company to create lines of communication, areas of responsibility and workflows between them. And the ideal co-sourcing relationship involves a level of knowledge transfer along the way, where the agency helps the company learn over time.

Outsourcing/co-sourcing can get you the rudiments, the mechanical requirements of a social media effort, but the magic, the awesome sauce (as the kids say), the part that really delivers results, that can’t be outsourced because it requires authenticity and needs to withstand scrutiny. And it needs to be easy-conversational, which can only be delivered by someone (or a handful of someones) who have the deep knowledge, the comfort and the freedom that comes from being a part of the organisation.

Next time I will deal with how to work with an agency in a co-sourcing social media arrangement, how to draw up the lines of demarcation.

Image by: markhillary

Listen to Episode 7 here 

2 Comments

  1. Great post Eric, with a title designed to grab the attention!

    The key points here are communication and resources.

    I work with a lot of clients, either looking after their social media or training them to write engaging, effective updates themselves. When you’re looking after someone’s social media accounts you have to spend time with the client, make sure you visit their building and get to know the people, and build in a lot of regular communication so that you’re ‘on message.’ It’s about knowing what they do want to talk about, as much as knowing what not to say - every company has a set of issues which are off limits, for example a project which is confidential or an old rivalry which means you shouldn’t engage with a certain person or promote them. You have to be proactive and not just wait for people to send you content - if they had time to do that they wouldn’t need to outsource their social media in the first place.

    And on the question of resources, while I will agree that having the social media updates produced by people within the company itself is preferable, what happens when people a) don’t have the time or b) the inclination? A lot of people who I work with know the value of social media but just don’t want to do it themselves…in the same way that I know how important it is to do my accounts, but getting a bookkeeper in makes the whole process more efficient and frees me up to do other things.

    Sometimes it is just a case of training, giving people the confidence and skills to do it themselves, and I always advise people to go that route if possible, rather than offering to run their Facebook/Twitter accounts for them. But sometimes outsourcing is the best option. For example, one of my clients is based in Europe with a global audience, and really wanted someone with English as their first language to be doing their social media. We’ve pushed their Facebook numbers up from 17k to nearly 40K in a year, so maybe outsourcing wasn’t such a bad idea…!

    Sue Keogh
    http://www.sookio.com and http://www.sweetretweets.co.uk

  2. Thanks, Sue!

    You, as usual, make very good points.

    I’m going to call you on one thing, however. Building a Facebook page from 17K to 40K is not axiomatically good. That’s the classic mistake of big = better. Are those extra 23K valuable at all? Are they our audience? Are they really interested? Will they engage? Will they buy something (or donate or recommend us or further our aims in some way)?

    There are a lot of companies out there (and I know you aren’t one of them) who offer to get you loads of followers or drive fans to your page. But those are low-value numbers because those followers ultimately have no real interest in what you are doing.

    Cheers,

    Eric

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