The Demands of Social Media Marketing on Staff and Resources
June 30, 2008
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As a social media agency, we get inquires every day from companies who are trying to figure out how social media marketing will impact their current marketing and business models. As you can imagine, the primary reasons these companies reach out to us is because either a) they have a specific project they need our expertise in, or b) the company has quickly realized the demands of social media marketing on staff and resources.
Lets face it: even though social media marketing is generally less expensive in the long-run than traditional mass-marketing, it still poses a rather large expense on a company in regards to staff and resources. For instance, a company trying to employ social media marketing without hiring an agency would require its entire marketing department
to become up to speed in social media marketing, internal staff to be trained and/or new staff hired, and a generous amount of internal resources in order to effectively employ the social media tactics.
This being said, I found a very interesting podcast (below) on PodTech about one such company that has discovered this through its latest foray into social media: H&R Block. In the following podcast, Paula Drum (VP of marketing for H&R) shares how one of the big surprises to social media marketing was, “how much human capital they had to spend to make the programs work”.
Have any of your own experiences? I would love to hear your company’s story.
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2 Responses to “The Demands of Social Media Marketing on Staff and Resources”
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As a consultant I run into this all the time. Companies mistakenly think social media is “free.” A good friend put it succinctly, “content costs money.” He’s right in a couple of ways. Not only in creating the content, but in managing it and the technology it is based on as well. How do you help companies understand this when the issue presents itself?
@ Deb - Often times we have experienced this. Often times we will draw a comparison of social media marketing compensation with traditional PR compensation. The two are similiar: while most of PR is free, what you pay for is time and expertise.
Another word of advice is to stick to your pricing. At this point, many companies don’t fully understand the amount of time social media marketing requires until either they try it for themselves or increase in understanding. Resist the temptation to undervalue your services to try to win business : this will only perpetuate the misconception.