Tesar-Reynes

Face it. If your brand doesn’t have a social media presence, you are behind the curve.

In the last three weeks, I’ve been to 3 social media Webinars from Cision, one interview for a position in new media for Valerie Denney Communications, and a 4 hour social media mini-retreat at my internship with Carolyn Grisko & Associates.

Everyone wants a piece of social media! The good news for you is that it’s still early enough in the game to jump in a get a handle on it all.

Cision innovates with their approach. For one, they don’t have a Twitter account, instead listing their employees Twitter handles and inviting you to connect with them. I advise you to give them all a follow. They are very accessible.

Cision has established themselves as a thought leader through their excellent blog and free Webinars on social media. I attended three different sessions – Social Media 101, Monitoring Social Media, and Engaging Social Media. All should be of some value to you, especially if you’re just getting started in the interactive space. The best part is they’re free and being offered again in the coming weeks.

Cision is offering a new service, the Cision Social Media Dashboard, through a partnership with Radian 6, a Cision counterpart in the social media world. It’s basically a service that aggregates all your blog hits, postings, comments and other social media hits in one interface. You enter some keywords, and they give you back everything on the Web that contains those keywords.

It’s very similar to their monitoring services for traditional media, just evolved for a social media campaign.

What I like about Cision’s marketing approach is that they’re actually using social media to promote their social media services. If you’re on Twitter, you can check out some of their Twitter traffic searching the hashtag #cisionlive. There you’ll find some really good info available to you.

How Does Social Media Fit into Your Agency?

For a brand like Cision, it makes sense to use social media to reach their target consumer. After all, their customer base is comprised of PR and marketing people looking to get involved in the digital landscape.

But what about agencies offering social media as a capability? This is something we discussed thoroughly during the social media mini-retreat at the firm I’m interning with. Is social media its own separate service, or a tool that you can integrate across the traditional channels of an integrated campaign?

I lean towards the latter. Social media is still too new in my book to distinguish it as its own capability. Recruiters and the bigger agencies tend to list social media under the digital or interactive umbrella.

Right now, companies with the cash flow are looking to hire social media managers. Smart move. The sooner you bring someone in house who has advanced social media skills the quicker he or she can get the rest of your workforce caught up to speed.