I read in article recently in marketing week entitled “Looking for new ways to make money in the age of free media” which discussed the rise of social media and its increasing strength and importance in shaping a brand and a products success. The article began intelligently enough discussing the rise of user generated channels and their importance in online PR and reputation management. This is all well and good and I completely agree with the importance of monitoring and managing a company or brands online profile to aid in its success. But the closing question posed by the article was “how do they (agencies) get paid?” which I thought was pretty damn obvious.
There are two precious commodities involved in any successful online campaign which are rarely held by a client, expertise and time. The majority of client side marketers (on or offline) would not know where to begin when looking at their online profile and certainly would not now the best way to leverage the channel to their advantage. This is where a good agency steps in with the knowledge and the contacts to deal with things in the appropriate manner. Then there is the time element which is one of the major reasons for any company taking on an agency for any activity. Only the largest companies have a marketing team which can take on board all work in house and produce work of the desired standard, the majority are best served acting as project manager and the owner of the final decision and leaving their roster to get on with the real work, especially when it comes to something as time consuming as online reputation management. When you combine these two factors you have a highly valuable, highly marketable product, and with consultants in many channels charging u to £5,000 per day I am surprised the writer asks such a naive question. After all SEO is technically “free” yet there are countless companies out there charging for their expertise and time in this area, social media and online PR fall under the same category.
i hate to quote something so very common, but here it goes:
“..think free as in free speech, not as in free beer”.
I’m not saying that all social media enable freedom, but in general surely promoted it. don’t you think?
absolutely I agree that speech is free and social networking provides a vehicle to spread the word. I was speaking more from an advertising and promotion stand point and in the case of this particular article which questioned how agencies could make money from this so called “free media”.