Something interesting happened last week. As I was going through my emails in the morning, I received an email marketing message from Ssense.com. Ssense is a high-fashion e-commerce website based out of Toronto. I came across their site recently when I clicked on a banner ad on a fashion blog. The email marketing alerted me to a members only sale that the firm was conducting. As I am wont to do, I tweeted out the links to this pair of boots that I wanted to buy.

Almost immediately, several of my followers chimed in with commentary.

It was a pretty slick ass boot as you can see from above so after hearing a chorus of approval I went ahead and daddy bought himself a new pair of shoes.

But then something interesting happened. A tweet from an unfamiliar source appeared in my stream. An account called Hub Shop tweeted at me, showing me a totally different shoe. It turns out that Hub Shop is a high end apparel company in the UK. They had, one way or another, seen my tweet about boots and replied, offering one of their own products up as an alternative to the purchase I would eventually make.

Tomorrow’s Marketing: Equal Parts Cool and Creepy

What Hub Shop did could very easily be a glimpse at the future of marketing. What did they do? They used the tools of social media to try to solicit a new customer. But it wasn’t spam. It was in fact very relevant, and the shoe that showed me, this shoe, was actually incredibly similar to the shoe I had tweeted about. For a minute, I actually considered buying them, and the whole time I didn’t even realize what had happened.

I had been marketed too AS CLOSE TO THE POINT OF SALE AS POSSIBLE. This is so incredibly brilliant. I was literally on the verge of spending money on a certain kind of boot. I shared this fact with one of my primary social networks. Somehow, Hub Shop became aware of this and felt they could garner a new client by offering up one of their own products. It was relevant, it was a similar price point (a bit higher actually) and it was effective. They weren’t offering me a new iPad or a discount if I joined their Facebook page. They were doing nothing more than putting one of their products in front of a consumer who was about to buy.

It took me a few hours to realize all this but when I did I think I got a vision of the next step in social marketing. Since social networks are now a place populated by both consumers and sellers, it was only a matter of time until marketers figured out how to authentically engage with customers and potential ones. Obviously this kind of thing doesn’t scale. A company couldn’t go around sending tweets with links to every Twitter user tweeting about boots. And if they did it would be obnoxious and would backfire.

But beyond putting a product in front of me, they got me to check out their website, take a look around, sign up for their email marketing and, of course, write this post.

That sounds like a pretty good version of social marketing to me.

Yesterday was a day. A very busy day. Long and productive training session with an exciting new client, followed by a very interesting and productive chat with the proprietor of a prominent restaurant PR firm here in Manhattan. A short conversation over drinks turned into a longer conversation about social media and PR. Who owns it?

For me, the question might be settled for now. PR owns social media. Here is why:

1. They have the clients
2. They have the expertise
3. Adding social media is easier than adding PR
4. They are better at social media than they think

Let’s take a closer look at each of these in a bit more depth.

PR Has the Client Relationships

I cannot and do not want to compete with public relations professionals and firms on their clients. For one, I think its unsavory and that is not why I am in the business. Secondly, I am not interested in traditional PR and even though that may be my preference as a social strategist, it may not be the preference of other social media professionals. I do believe that social media is the most important aspect of marketing right now and believe that it requires enough thought and fortune telling that its more than adequate to keep a single individual busy.

But most important, PR firm has the relationships already in place. Surely many people are never happy with their PR, and some people don’t need it but still think they do. Whatever the case, PR firms has long established clients that trust them to do their work, to return phone calls, to get the job done. This is extremely important.

PR Has the Expertise

Let me be clear, they do NOT have the expertise in social media. They have the expertise, or should, in everything else though. And as I said in point #3, it is much easier to add social media into a package of services than it is to add in everything else (branding, PR, marketing, events). I think it is clear that if a firm has the ability to properly run a traditional PR campaign, than they have the capability to add social into that mix. This is just not the case with independent social media marketers. And even if lone wolves (and wolfettes, cause frankly some of the smartest and most able social media people I know are female) come from the traditional PR place, if they are on their own, they will be more successful to stick with just social media and adding it onto other peoples work.

PR Is Good at Social Media…

if they would only take the time to learn. And the best way to learn is how?

DIY. So instead of PR firms rushing to offer social media to their clients, I urge them to do 1 thing first. Socialize your OWN business. Do social media for yourself before you start offering it to your clients. Take the long term view and give up trying to offer something you don’t really grasp. The best thing a PR firm can do, if they want to capitalize on the enormous amount of business that will soon be coming their way in the form of the social media needs of their clients, is to learn the ropes. Listen to what social media is telling you, devise a strategy, launch the blog, get your people involved. Learn web design and development. Steal from the best sites. Learn to market your content, learn how to integrate Facebook and Twitter, learn to build up strong accounts (and please don’t chase followers) understand analytics, evolve along the way.

The amount of knowledge gleaned from even a few months of consistent social media-ing is worth boatloads of cold hard cash to PR firms. But you have to take the long term view. The PR companies I know and speak to don’t know what to do when their clients ask them to take on social media. They don’t know what obligations and responsibilities to assume, and they don’t know how or what to charge for that. Many still believe that social media is something that can simply be appended to a current marketing strategy or plan. It can’t. It needs to be held at a specific angle, wafted, twirled in one’s own hands before one knows how to wield it for others.

This is the only way. But PR firms should rejoice. Cause they won.

Image Courtesy of zhengxu on Flickr

The Ups and Downs

The twists and turns of independent consulting right now are dramatic and severe. One day we are absolutely essential and urgent RFP’s flow in. The next we are as unnecessary as can be. The hot and cold nature of clients can throw even the most stable consultant into a tizzy. I’ve had clients pepper me with questions until both they and I are blue in the face. And then come back for another round. I’ve had potential clients ask me for proposals only to tell me my services won’t be necessary and sitting back and watching them institute every single one of my ideas.

As more and more companies get familiar with social media and convince themselves they need to engage, the temperature and intensity of client interactions and pitches is heightening. And so much as independent strategists like myself desire this, there are some pitfalls to watch out for.

Most of all is the tendency to react to quickly to client overtures. Personally, I get way too excited by consults that go well. I even get excited by meetings that don’t go so well. This a form of arrogance that needs to be tempered. Because people on the bleeding edge of social media interaction, those that are well-informed of trends and developments in the social space, who know how to use the tools, who have programs worked out ahead of time for their clients, believe themselves to be more than necessary. And you know what, in a way we are. But just because we feel this way, doesn’t meant the rest of the world does, especially those that we are pitching.

Yes its true that many managers and those holding the purse strings are taking social media much more seriously than they were even a few short months ago. I spent most of the fall explaining to potential clients why they need to engage with social media. I no longer need to do that. Great! But with this added businesses comes another level of scrutiny that social media marketers need to adjust to. We are often faced with people who only have a tentative grasp of the issues and the tendency is for people to act like they know more then they do. It then requires time for us to parse through exactly what we are dealing with.

The Twists and Turns

The twists and turns that social media marketing can take are varied. I’ve had consultancies start with a specific set of goals in mind only to find two weeks in I am knee deep in issues that were never on the table. Often this is because clients don’t have the necessary infrastructure to carry out our pre-approved goals. This is one of the most fraught situations to face because everything gets pushed back, and then the client, often looking for reasons to believe you aren’t worth the trouble, time or money, can point to lack of progress. It’s not fair, but life never is! And we are the ones who have to shoulder the burden, because after all, we work for the client. It’s their dime.

The rapid nature of social media marketing, and the entire world online forces strategists to constantly be on their toes. Not only do we need to effectively service our current clients, we have to perform due diligence on future projects, pitch new clients. On top of all that we have to remain completely up to date with developments in the social space.

What new apps or applications or social networks are launching?

How will these effect my current or future clients? What about client’s that have already been serviced? Do we have to go back to those clients and ensure that they are up to date with these new developments.

For instance, right now I am watching the controversy over Facebook, which I wrote about yesterday, and how it may effect marketing on social networks. At the exact moment that many of the businesses I know are getting ready to finally engage Facebook in a serious way, it may be that Facebook is on its way out. Yes that is exactly how serious this controversy is. Facebook may be on its way out. And right now businesses are out there making plans to dominate what could very well be a defunct or at the least a highly compromised service.

In short, social media is a roller coaster ride of emotions and actions. The best we can hope for is to hold on tight, trust in the integrity of the system we have in place, and even try to have a little fun! Throw your hands up in the air! I know that after a tough couple of weeks here I am pledged to try , sit back, trust in the integrity of the system I have built over the past 9 months, and simply enjoy the ride.

Image Courtesy of flatluigi on Flickr

Kerfuffle is the only way to describe the latest controversy over Facebook and its new stance towards its user’s privacy. The truth is that Facebook can’t believe in privacy anymore because if it does, it doesn’t have much of a future. The future of Facebook (and of every other social network) lies in its ability to monetize its user base. The best way to monetize your user base is to collect and organize that highly detailed and targeted information and sell it to marketers. Or package it in a way that marketers can deploy it using the internet’s ingrained and sophisticated form of advertising.

From today’s Financial Times:

Facebook is thus important not only to investors but to everyone interested in the future of the internet, which is practically all of us. If it decides, in Google’s phrase for deceiving or messing around with its customers, to “be evil” then millions feel the effects.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old who founded Facebook as a private social network for Harvard students, has recently been displaying a disregard bordering on disdain for Facebook users’ right to maintain control over personal information.

This is the dilemma facing social networks. If they go too far with their user’s data, then they run the risk of losing the trust of those user’s (perhaps the most important equity there is in the 21st century). But if they don’t go far enough, then they aren’t of much value in the long run.

I think what we are missing in all of this is that our definition of Privacy is shifting. Not for everyone, in fact, some are calling for stricter standards and default settings. I have to say that these people have a point, even though I fundamentally disagree with it. The truth is that the goal posts have shifted. Privacy is certainly not what it was a generation ago. The problem our culture seems to have is even recognizing that the shift is going on, and then overreacting when it hits us in the face. Here is the dirty truth about privacy: most people don’t care.

Mr Zuckerberg was at least speaking plainly, unlike last December, when he wrote in an open letter that “our work to improve privacy continues today”. He failed to mention that, eight days later, it would turn six aspects of each user profile, including gender, location and the friends list, into “publicly available information”.

If Facebook users were allowed a free choice, they might well tick the box to accept anyway. His vision of the “open graph”, in which Facebook’s users engage more with websites they visit and applications they use because the services are tailored to them, has allure.

Facebook’s Social Graph API

I spent the better part of last week going over the extensive documentation for Facebook’s new social graph API. Discovering just how OPEN the default settings were was pretty shocking. It allows a website to access not only a person’s name but their email, address, birthday as well as their entire list of friends. That’s pretty dramatic. If only I were a savvy sick manipulating marketer I could have a field day with all that data.

And here I am looking at this radical approach to openness and privacy and realizing that we’ve now reached the crossroads between marketing and privacy. Marketers have spent the better part of a century trying to get the very same data that networks like Facebook and Foursquare now have on us. Who we are, who are friends are, what we like, what we consume, where we are, where we spend our money and how we do so?

I mean this is the holy grail of marketing segmentation. And yet, I couldn’t help but be turned off by the thought of that data being used for the wrong purposes. And yet knowing what I know about human nature I know that is exactly what will happen. I think people are in for a surprise in the coming months. They will soon be targeted with advertisements in ways that are so personal and so relevant that it is going to be severely off-putting.

But I think what bothers me most is our society’s total inability to actually have the conversation that we need to have about privacy. Let’s just talk about it: let us talk about what should and should not be off-limits. From my perspective, I actually have no problem with my privacy settings being wide open. That is because I am analyzing how I am marketed so that I can turn it around and help my clients think strategically about how to do it better. Or differently.

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Image Source: alancleaver_2000 on Flickr

Last week I wrote a post somewhat sensationally titled, “What the hell is Foursquare doing?” In that piece I criticized the still-young company about what I perceived was a tin ear regarding certain complaints.

Which is why I am befuddled at some of the partnerships and directions the young company seems to be taking. I am not sure if it is due to their tremendous growth, both in users and internally, or the ridiculous expectations that everyone seems to have, but Foursquare doesn’t seem to know what its doing. I wish they would just tell us. Isn’t the hallmark of the social web supposed to be that everything is open and transparent, authentic and honest? Is that only for the users of these services but not for the companies that enable us?

In particular, I have been very critical of Foursquare’s customer service when it comes to helping business owners utilize their marketing offerings. I’ve worked with a bunch of firms trying to utilize this unique service who have been dissapointed with the functionality. The forms that Foursquare uses were counterintuitive and it was common for firms to get absolutely no feedback or contact from Foursquare. This was unacceptable.

I am interested because I think incentivizing both people and businesses is they to Foursquare’s growth and its success. But that’s not where they are directing their energy. I’ve worked with businesses who have tried multiple times to get their specials on Foursquare. The customer service is basically non-existent. One client got a message saying they were simply overwhelmed and were having technical issues uploading all the new specials and deals. The risk in this is that even if you can get venues interested enough to take the time to offer specials and deals to Foursquare’s own users, by making it extremely hard to do so, they are only alienating their future business partners.

Which is why I was so pleased to see that Foursquare was taking it seriously enough to make some minor changes. Every business venue has a unique ID on Foursquare’s platform, and what Foursquare has done is make it exceptionally easy for business owners (or their marketing or PR firms) to claim their business. They’ve done so by placing a little widget above the map of the venue that says “Are you the manager of this business.” Brilliant, simple, easy.

It’s what they needed to do, and its what they’ve done. I criticized them for not doing it sooner, and now that this has been corrected, I am only too happy to call attention to it.

One other thing caught my attention as well, and that is that beneath every venue they’ve also integrated the near-ubiquitous Facebook “like” button. Interesting that they are experimenting with Facebook’s new social graph plugins considering that Facebook is on the verge of launching a location-based service as well.

Although many believe that Facebook’s “Places” is going to nullify Foursquare I actually disagree and think there is plenty of room in the eco-system for location based applications and functionality. Based on some of the troubles that Foursquare has had lately (their service was done for hours just last week) I am not so sure Facebook is immediately going to leap-frog them. As of now, Foursquare has a great brand name and reputation in the space. And Facebook? We’ll let’s just say that some of their recent efforts are starting to rub even some of its oldest supports the wrong way.[fblike layout_style='button_count' show_faces='true' verb='recommend' font='lucide grande' color_scheme='light']

What follows are my notes from the luncheon that Bryce Gruber and I held last week for public relations professionals:

The Real Opportunity for PR Firms Right Now

Businesses and brands know they need to get acquainted with social media marketing. But they aren’t keen on hiring untested and unproven social media marketers. PR Firms already have the client relationships. They have trust and experience. Yet they have so far failed to wrap social media into their services in any tangible way. At the most they’ve paid lip service.

The reason for this is because they don’t know social media marketing themselves. They don’t know the tools, the services, the networks, the protocols; one could argue that most of all they don’t understand the philosophy behind social media. This is because social media operates in almost diametric opposition to what they do know which is controlling the message, broadcasting a brand surgically, and using their access (to journalists, tastemakers, cultural arbiters) to promote their clients.

But as more brands and businesses get comfortable with social media, with their needs and budgets and time constraints, they want guidance. PR firms are much better situated then someone like myself to service their clients. And anyway, I don’t want to take clients away from anyone. I am not good at PR. You are. But I have skills that you need. So learn them. And let me teach you.

The New Tools of Public Relations

Managing the needs of clients has never been easier with some of the tools that have been developed. Tweetdeck, Social Mention, Klout, Seesmic, HootSuite, Co-Tweet. All of these services didn’t exist two years ago, and now they are here changing the way millions of people interact with technology. They make everything from work flow, to brand monitoring, to identifying influencers to marketing incredibly easier.

On top of that, there are great open-source blogging software that enable anyone to have a blog up and running in about 20 minutes. It’s really that easy. And it’s free. WordPress is by far the easiest blogging platform that businesses can use. And yet, in order to get the most out of it, it does require some new knowledge, basic HTMLand CSS to start. This is going to require PR firms to bring in open-source developers or at the very least liaison with them frequently.

Search enging optimization is a no-brainer and yet people frequently throw the term around in a way that lets you know they don’t really understand what it is or why its important. SEO, as the term is referred to, is nothing more than optimizing your content so that it can indexed and found by people looking for it. That’s it. In practice, it is as simple as spending two minutes adding keywords and tags to a blog post or video or image. The results are fantastic.

Your clients will soon be getting the hits they are looking for. And there are even some new tools on this end emerging that literally tell you what keywords and tags to use. Scribe SEO is the best out of these.

Community Managing and Social Media

PR Firms are well-organized and optimized to run the digital and social efforts of their clients. One of the things I have repeatedely run up against is the inability of many clients to handle their social media needs. They few it as something that can be done for ten minutes a day. It can’t. But it doesn’t and should not dominate your schedule either. PR firms are working with their clients anyway to work on corporate copy, press releases, working on placements; it makes perfect sense for PR firms to also handle all social copy.

A few collaborative blog posts a week, the managing of a Twitter account, and synchronization of the brand identity across social networks: Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, etc. Community managing takes time, and it takes a person who has the freedom and creativity to represent a brand, to develop that internal voice as blogger, tweeter and customer service rep. PR firms need to start offering this, NOW. They will find lots of new business if they do.

Social Media as Crisis Management Tool

Social media is one of the most natural crisis management tools available. Imagine a restaurant getting a mediocre review in the paper. With a fully functional social media platform embedded within the businesses strategy, client and PR firm can activate their community to protect themselves. They can leverage their relationships and BYPASS THE CRITICS.

You can highlight your successes and positive reviews. You can point potential customers–who if they didn’t know about you before the crisis, surely have heard of you now– to specific areas of your organizations. If you’ve been blogging for awhile and building up a lengthy list of dynamic content, then when people start googling you to find out what this is all about, they’ll find your content. And lots of it.

And if a client has been engaging social media for awhile, they’ll have found and fostered their native community, that group of fans and clients, who will come to their defense, pointing to their own positive experiences. This can deflate criticism before it grabs a hold of a business.

Social Media Measurement and PR

PR firms are better exhibitors of metrics. They talk in the client’s language. Have you ever tried to talk to a social media consultant about metrics? Page views, uniques, absolute uniques, retweets, shares, mentions. It never stops. And the reason is never stops is because measuring success in social media is nascent. You can have all the page views in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to more sales then what good is it? Not much. But what about brand equity? Sure, that counts, but businesses and brands are going to continue to build brand equity where and how they know how. But PR firms also need to get in the game and start offering social media measurement as part of their analysis, whether internally or client-side. Don’t spend a lot of money on flashy software. There is no point. The free tools are just as good and reliable. Everyone else is using them as well.

Conclusion

Right now PR firms are exquisitely positioned to capture a lot of new business and add-value to existing business. No one doubts that social media has changed the game. It has, and increasingly, online spend is where the growth will be. PR firms need to be in that space, about ten minutes ago. If you aren’t yet, get on it. If you need to know how, if you need to craft a strategy, you know where to find me.

The best way for a PR firm to start adding in social media marketing into their portfolio of services is to start one for themselves. That is, they should be blogging, they should be on Twitter and Facebook. They should be communicating on social networks as a firm. Identify people in your organization who can and want to do so and let them take the lead. Then rotate different people into the community managing role so that as many people as possible get some exposure. When blogging and tweeting becomes part of your job description, it is that much easier to convince a client to do so, and to point them to your own successes.

Would you trust someone with your social media who doesn’t do it themselves?

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Image Source: The Cleveland Kid on Flickr

Businesses and brands don’t need Social Media PR. Let PR firms handle PR, both traditional and social. Businesses that are struggling to find the time, energy or resources to begin engaging social media need to get caught up quickly.

What businesses need most right now is Social Media Boot Camp. They need a quick and intensive consultation and training in social media. They need someone to come in and sit down with them for a series of conversations so that they can make informed decisions about what their business needs out of social media.

They need someone to listen to the story of their business from start to finish. Where are they now? Where have they been? How did they get there? What do they want? What do they need? Who are they?

Then, they need to begin training. They need to get an overview of social media, from soup to nuts, how it started, how its developed, where it is now, and of course, where its going. They need to talk about all the areas that social media overlaps with: PR and marketing, customer service, IT and technology, branding even human resources.

Then, they need to craft a plan together integrating the results from the series of conversations. That plan needs to be managed by the consultant with the business owner or manager heavily involved on a day-to-day basis. Meeting once a week just isn’t going to cut it. Too much to cover, and if you only have a month, you need to get things done. Businesses need to see results. And they should. If you stretch a social media consulting arrangement over a period of months, the business owners don’t see the results. And they lose the immediacy of having to devote time and resources now. Why would they? When they have 3 months ahead of them.

It just doesn’t work.

So I am changing how I work. I am still very happy to help a firm with their social PR needs, but the real value I can provide is in providing firms a jump start into the world of social media. Spend a month with me and you’ll be ready. You’ll have a new website and a blog. You’ll have Foursquare specials. You’ll understand how Google, Yelp, Chow, Citysearch fit into your business and how you can take control of your online presence.

You’ll have a sophisticated listening and monitoring system in place so that you can track the conversations, both good and bad, your brand is generating.

You’ll have the essentials of a social media marketing campaign, with a blog, a Facebook account, Twitter, YouTube channel.

You’ll have a content marketing strategy in place for the next 3 months.

You’ll have the tools in place to measure your success.

You’ll have the confidence that you have done the right thing for your business by taking control of your destiny and the future success of your business.

You’ll finally prepared to leverage social media.

Image Source: Jayel Aheram on Flickr

Eric Fulwiler contributed to this article both in spirit and tone. The last section is his addition, quoted verbatim. He blogs at Opinion at Large, and is really wicked smart. Follow him on Twitter, and read his blog. He’s my new hero.

What if I told you that you could have my services for free? What if I told you that there was absolutely zero-risk to bringing in a social media consultant, someone who had experience training businesses in social media, worked with them to integrate and synchronize their marketing efforts to include social media marketing? What if I told you that instead of charging you X thousands of dollars a month you could keep your cash and only pay me if I increased your business. Would you rather have a 10% of something or 100% of nothing?

I am in the services business. I have knowledge and insight that I am willing to trade you for money. To be honest, I feel too much like a lawyer. I get paid whether my services help you or not. I think this is emblematic of a broken way of doing business. Personally, I’d rather have my pay tied to my performance. I’d rather my interests and the interests of the business I am working with be intertwined. This incentivization scheme is more positive.

Let’s see how this might work:

1. Instead of paying me two thousand dollars a month to train your staff, rebuild or redesign your website, market your business (traditionally and digitally), you offer me a percentage of any business that I generate. Let’s say the number is 20 percent.
2. We take a snap shot of your business from the last month, the last quarter and the last year and agree on exactly what income you have as your baseline. Any business going forward, for a specific amount of time, call it 6 months or a year, I get 10 percent of.
3. Let’s say your net income before “hiring” me, is $15,000 a month. In month 1 of our interaction there is no change. Therefore I get paid nothing. Integrating social media marketing takes time, and requires the bandwidth for businesses and marketers to spend time blogging, twittering, figuring out how to market with new tools like Foursquare and Groupon. These tools take time to take effect. So fine, first month, your business is where it was, and I get paid nothing
4. Second month you see a 30 percent bump in your business. We ran a Groupon special and had 500 check-ins on Foursquare, of which 35 took advantage of the “Mayor Special” we had integrated. So now there is $4500 dollars that goes into the shared pool. I get 20% of that which is $900.  You have $3600 more dollars.

Would you make this deal?

The following is from Eric:

There is something wrong with the social media consulting industry. There is too much risk, and not enough proven reward. Not to mention the market is completely over-saturated with experts and thought leaders. But the industry will evolve. It’s just a question of whether you will be in front of or behind that trend.

Business is an equation. Return/investment. The problem with the current social media consulting model is that the return is uncertain and sometimes unproven, while the investment is usually fixed and definite. A business pays 5,000 dollars a month for a consultant who they hope will increase their business. In this situation, the equation looks like this: ???/5000. Not too appealing to a business owner.

What is appealing to a business owner (or anybody) is a no risk investment. A business pays only if there is a proven ROI on the social media consulting. The equation becomes something like: x/.2x. A business pays 1000 to a consultant at the end of one month because it earned an additional 5000 in revenue over that period. In this equation there is no question mark, and R will always be greater than I. If return is always greater than investment, there is no risk for the investor.

Death to the agency! Long live the agency!

Lots of talk about agencies out there in the blogosphere and the twittersphere and the Galaxy of public relations professionals, social media consultants, events coordinators, brand managers, sponsorship experts. The reason there is so much talk, much of it pabulum by the by, but the reason there is so much talk and speculation is that the very idea of what an agency is, is changing, rapidly.

Right now if you are a business owner you are dealing with a whole new set of rules. You don’t have the bandwidth to focus on your business and keep a stern eye on developments online, as well as manage your current marketing efforts. You have a PR firm that you are either straight-up unhappy with (but don’t have the courage to fire) or you have one that suspects is taking too much for what you see as just an OK job.

You know there are new marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter, Foursquare and Groupon that weren’t around when your business started. But being the smart person that you are, you are fairly confident that if given the proper attention, you could find a way to leverage these new tools and channels to increase your business. Maybe you’ve asked your PR firm about these new tools but the answers you’ve gotten back haven’t amounted to much.

Furthermore, your website needs a redesign but you are tired of getting overcharged by web designers who don’t speak your language and you suspect that spending another 10k on a website that you won’t be happy with and that you won’t have control over is not the way to go.

What’s more is that you’ve been wanting to do some co-branding with other business and perhaps get involved in some local events. You want to foster the community but you don’t know where to start. You’ve heard the buzzwords like: community, conversation, content. You think locally. And you want to support that locale. But again, bandwidth, you don’t have enough of it. You know that you could do a better job of building your business for the long haul, a sustainable business that adds to your life, that removes the drama, that cuts the tension.

This is the sum total of the conversations I’ve had with over 100 small business owners from a dozen industries since September.

So what is the answer?

Build A New Agency

Building a new kind of agency from the ground up is the only real solution. Current PR firms are catching up. In fact they’ve surprised me with how quickly they’ve been able to. In the end though, they are catching up to something that they still don’t understand. So catching up becomes moot. Any social media value that your PR firm can bring you right now is suspect.

A new agency that brings together the following is really what we are talking about: Traditional PR, Social Media Marketing, Events and Co-Branding, Technology, Business Development. These are the cornerstones of the New Agency as I see it. You have to integrate it. You have to be a one-stop shop for businesses. Most clients won’t need it all. They’ll simply need PR and Technology, or Social and Events. But having the ability to provide deep expertise and value in all of these silos is really what businesses need. Integration is the next step.

Why should businesses need to to five different vendors to satisfy their needs. They are all after the same goal. Try finding 5 vendors you want to work with, or that you can afford to pay properly. An agency that already does everything a business might need is the best approach I can see.

Image Source: USACE Europe District on Flickr

I have some exciting news to share with you all. Something that has been in the works for a few weeks now but which I am now prepared to announce. My good friend Bryce Gruber of The Luxury Spot and I are hosting an intimate luncheon for public relations professionals on April 27th. The title of the talk is “Social Media 2010: The Year PR Steps Up,” and it is intended as an informal luncheon and chat with two people who “get” how new media works. The luncheon will be held at the fantastic downtown restaurant Emporio. It was selected because the staff is wonderful, the food is delicious and locally-sourced, and they have a perfect sun-drenched back room.

The impetus for the luncheon was a series of conversations that Bryce and I have had about the kind of changes the PR firms need to make in order to remain relevant and effectively serve their clients. Bryce has tremendous influence in the PR community because of her success. I, on the other hand, lack that influence or even visibility for a variety of reasons. For one, when I launched my business, I wanted nothing to do with traditional PR practices and methodologies. In fact, I have been a stern critic of the PR mentality for several months here on the blog.

And yet, as I gained more clients, and the experience that came along with them, I soon realized that my earlier orthodoxy was overblown. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, I came to understand that in fact social media and PR have a lot to do with one another and can be complimentary rather than oppositional. I can tell you that in my last few client engagements I have been urging my clients to use their social media as an addendum to their traditional press outreach. Bryce has been pushing me in this direction for some time, and it was only due to how much I respect her that I didn’t slam the phone down on her on several occasions.

The more Bryce and I talked, the more need we realized existed for bridge-building to occur. As someone who writes about the benefits of community building a lot, I could find no better way than to foster the community than to be part of a team that was willing to reach out and help fellow marketers. The truth is that as a consultant, social media strategist, whatever the heck I am, public relations is a powerful and important business. And Bryce and I want to ensure that PR firms and the wonderfully creative people who work there have a way to learn the basics of social media in a non-threatening intimate environment, one that is conducive to them taking the first steps towards gaining a grasp of the power of social media.

Bryce and I will both be speaking during the lunch, and each of us will focus on our strengths. Bryce will be speaking about effective SEO practices and creating buzz-worthy viral content. I will be focusing on the new tools available to PR professionals: things like Tweetdeck, Twitter Lists, web alerts, listening stations, traffic ranking sites and the importance of blogging. What both of us will also touch on, and which I believe will be the most valuable part of the luncheon, will be the philosophy underlying social media. That philosophy, one of transparency, authenticity and that occurs in public, is the biggest shift the PR industry will need to make. It is going to be a great time, so if you think you’d like to attend, take a look at the invitation below and be sure to click this link in order to buy a ticket. Tickets are $55 now and it includes a 3-course prix fixe lunch (tax and tip are included) Prices are going to go up to $75 on April 10th, so be sure to grab yours now. If you know someone who might be interested, we’d love it if you passed it along!