A recent poll across North America, France and the U.K has found that agencies typically don’t “get” social media.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise amongst people reading Blogstorm as most of us saw how SEO and online marketing was changing some time ago and adapted to it early on. We see clients every week who have been working with SEO companies on a blog marketing strategy for months and not gained any traction.
Clients complained that their agencies — creative, media, public relations, design and others — typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area.
It is usually impossible for an marketing or SEO agency with no blogging experience to start a successful blog for a client. Look at the submissions some well known SEO companies make to Digg and even Sphinn and it’s embarrassing sometimes.
“The existing marketing partners do not understand the ins and outs of the social media space,” David Harris, e-business manager at Suzuki, told TNS. “They can do more harm than good if they apply old models.”
“You get the sense that agencies talk a good game,” said Jim Nail, of TNS Media. “They put up a good presentation about what social media is, but when you get to implementing campaigns, the day-to-day management skills are not meeting the marketers’ expectations.”
In the past a lot of SEO was about finding ways to beat the Google algorithm. Finding links that worked, ways to give Google what they wanted and get to the top as quick as possible.
That might be fine for Google but the same strategies don’t translate to social media. You can’t fake your way to a successful social media strategy.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I take it when you talk agencies, you are talking about ad. agencies?
There is a big difference between Seo mark up and copy that informs.
Its fine being top of the search engine listings but when the copy is full of Seo language instead of interesting, attention grabbing, relevant information the visitor leaves.
It’s fine getting the hits but creating on-going business? No. it doesn’t work.
With the increase to over 100 million bloggers and sites. Who makes the money?
Who pays? The poor new guy without experience?
The demographic in the blog market is too varied for our clients.
But, thanks for the article. Its always good to read others views.
Take care and remember to get as much joy as you can everyday.
This is a big point. If you thing about how when your write a good post you get a surge of traffic, imagine if companies did the same. It is such an efficient way of doing things. Not to mention the potential for many backlinks and lots of buzz.
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