If you are an avid reader of my blog posts (I mean, who isn't, right?) then you probably know that I tend to write on the topic of social media. I write about social media primarily because I personally enjoy using the services on which I extrapolate and because it happens to be my job to sell folks on the benefit of engaging target audiences using these services. Having said this, what I am writing about today may at first glance seem somewhat contradictory to my profession (and might even smack of blasphemy to some of my socially-strategic brethren!) but I feel that it's time to lay down some brutal truths.

You see, in my profession I have the sometimes-duplicitous role of building up a client's expectations at the onset of a social media campaign while, at the same time, tempering those expectations. The buzz surrounding social media makes it an attractive marketing tactic, especially with the many successful case studies one can reference. However, the social media landscape is laden with pitfalls and barriers, and even the best laid schemes of mice and mad men often go awry. It is in the best interest of the client, and the agency itself by way of cultivating a long-term relationship, that this reality is addressed and not mitigated in the hopes of of winning the account or project.

To better describe what I am trying to explain, let's take a look at the imaginary company BetterButter. BetterButter is a medium-size, B2C provider of organic peanut butter. They have been around for roughly three years and have had modest success in the Northeast region of the USA. The Powers That Be at the company have decided that it is imperative to establish a social presence. After a brief review, BetterButter chose Agency X to help them achieve this goal. Agency X begins to set into motion the development of a Facebook fan page and a Facebook application, as well as a twitter-centric promotional campaign.

Now fast-forward a year. The Powers That Be at the company are perplexed. They have invested a fair amount of time and capital into growing the brand socially, but the results have been far from a commercial success. The Facebook page has only 150 fans. The application (a nifty peanut butter recipe-generator) has only been adopted by 40 people, 25 of which are employees and their family members. The brand's twitter account has 230 followers, 30% of which consist of attractive women with x-rated links for viewing and the several twitter promotions have not increase the company's presence on the service, let alone any substantial increase in sales. The Powers That Be can't understand why this campaign hasn't yielded the results they projected and Agency X inferred.

If you are a small-to-medium size business, this scenario may sound eerily familiar. If it does, it's because your internal marketing team or third-party agency that carried out your campaign either didn't know what they were doing or were simply to eager to take advantage of the buzz surrounding social media. This scenario, whether fictional or close-to-home, is indicative of what's wrong with our industry right now. It is our responsibility when providing these services to our clientele to be forthright in stressing the substantial barriers of entry that exist in the social realm, rather than take advantage of an organizations eagerness to "get social." The following are several things I think every client must know before strategy can be discussed, let alone executed:

1. Social media is not the end-all, be-all answer to an organization's marketing goals. It is merely a component, albeit an increasingly crucial one, to your overall marketing mix. The core parts of that traditional mix, most importantly branding and corporate identity, must be strategically developed and executed. As with all of your communications efforts, you want a unified communications front. If your brand or corporate identity is not established, then your social presence will lack a real-world tangibility.

2. To expand on the subject of the importance of branding, I'd like to note the correlation between brand-loyalty and successful social marketing. The largest asset an organization can have at the onset of a social media campaign is a brand-loyal consumer base. Brand-loyal consumers provide you with a pre-established network that is already exicted and knowledgeable about your organization/product and therefore likely to be receptive to any attempts to socialize with you. From a viral standpoint, you need to use this group as your mavens. If you are lacking in brand-loyalty, then one of the long-term goals of your social campaign should be to build that base. Think quality over quantity in terms of followers/friends.

3. Has your organization developed an application for one or several of the major social networks? If so, you probably spent a good chunk of change on it and have not received the ROI you expected at the onset. Here is a sobering statistic that you should be aware of: only 1% of the applications on Facebook account for 77% of volume in terms of usage. Last I checked, there were over 17,000 applications on Facebook. That means that only 170 applications are being adopted by the majority of users. I'm not saying that applications aren't great viral tools (I may just put myself out of a job if I were); rather I am stating that your application had better be engaging and useful to your audience if it is to succeed. If your social media presence is in its nascent stage, it is probably not a wise idea to launch an application. If you do have a firmly established social presence, make sure that what you application offers is unique and, most importantly, serves a useful purpose.

4. What is the status of your organization's current digital presence? (Note that I said "digital" presence and not "social," and by this I mean any and all web-related endeavors. What's your website like? Is it dated? Slow? Informative? What's level of traffic does your site experience? These are important questions to ask before launching a social media campaign because what you distribute socially should be, in terms of best practice, short and sweet. The real bulk of information is located on your website, and one of the primary goals of any social media campaign should be to increase traffic to your site.

5. Does your company have a blog? It should and, while there are great third-party blog sites available, that blog should exist within your own domain. A blog is the best opportunity you have to: establish thought leadership and expertise, display your corporate identity and personality, optimize your site's search engine ranking and allow for direct dialogue with the community your are seeking to build or grow through trackback and comments features. More often then not, engaging an audience through social media means participating in a conversation that is directed by the community itself. Your blog is were you set the agenda.

There are still other things to consider when planning a social media strategy, all of which should be determined by conducting a preliminary audit of your marketing mix and digital presence. As communications professionals, it is our duty to make sure that we are honestly and accurately assessing our client's strengths and weaknesses at the onset of any social media endeavor. It can be difficult, especially in these trying financial times, not to be blinded by dollar signs when approached for this type of service. To best serve our clients, we need to be brutally honest about the barriers of entry that exist in social media, as well as communicate the importance of traditional marketing, PR and advertising.

Beyond all of this (and thorny subject matter to be further elaborated on in a future post) we need to redefine - for this specific medium - how we measure the success of these campaigns. Promising a lofty, or mollifying a more realistic, ROI goal does not accurately reflect the value inherent in participating in this medium. I have worked in public relations, where there exists a similar debate on attempting to quantify the value of a media hit. I've always been of the camp that believes that a story in the New York Times speaks for itself and need not be quantified through the application of the Advertising-Value-Equivalent method (measuring the size or length of the placement, using current ad pricing to determine what an ad of that size or length would cost, then multiplying by 1.5 or up to 3). In social media circles I've heard others refer to ROE, or Return On Engagement, which I think is much more representative of the nature of this beast. Simply put, we need to work with our clients to categorically determine how "success" is to be defined at the onset of any social media campaign.

In the communications industry, hyperbole is always abound. Having admitted that, I will now make the following statement with absolutely no intention of embellishment: We are now in the business of empowering consumers. Where as our predecessors may have focused on less than ethical means of driving sales by preying on the consumers fears and desires, today we are creating new and better ways to grant consumers power in terms of encouraging brand-ownership, striving for transparency and cultivating relationships.

Now, this was not an internal, altruistic revolution within our ranks. I'd be giving us too much credit to claim that. Consumer empowerment was not the product of any effort on our part, but rather the opposite. The World Wide Web opened up the floodgates of information and social media has connected consumers in an unprecedented manner, the cumulative result being an ever-increasingly savvy consumer. In today's marketplace, our old smoke and mirrors magic has been rendered impotent.

As the colloquial saying goes, "If you can't beat'em, join'em!" So we have. And why shouldn't we? Who needs focus groups when one can just spend some time on Twitter and Facebook to get candid feedback from real consumers? Why should we continue to push the 30-second spot when digital campaigns are so much more effective? Why pursue traditional, top-down communications when we can have direct dialogue with the consumer? Why am I asking so many obvious, rhetorical questions?

The one trend that I am most excited about, and the one that is most illustrative of my argument, is the use of crowdsourcing. Several big name brands have launched crowdsourcing campaigns recently, Starbucks being the one of the biggest. Starbucks launched the site "My Starbucks Idea" and encouraged visitors to post their own ideas on how to improve Starbucks service and products. Visitors where also encouraged to vote on the user-generated suggestions that they thought were the best. Starbucks has pledged to put the top-ranked ideas into action. Also, check out what Dell has been doing in this same vein over at www.ideastorm.com.

Today and moving forward, our job as communicators is to create the platforms and campaigns that drive consumer participation. I for one, find this an exciting era our industry is entering and I am genuinely proud to be a part of it. Too be honest, in my youth I used to idolize the spin doctors and admen who could sell snake oil to cure syphilis, but I find myself embracing their obsolescence. I'm sure that I sleep better at night than they did.

This article was originally published on Talentzoo.com and featured in the site's "From The Frontlines" column.

When I had just graduated from college, jobs in the Detroit communications industry were few and far between (for more on my personal, job seeking experiences, check out this Talent Zoo article). Faced with a seemingly endless stack of bills from my college years and needing an immediate source of income, I started waiting tables. I can't even begin to describe the level of humiliation and degradation I felt during that time of my life but, in retrospect, I learned many lessons that I apply to my profession today.

In the time I've spent in the communications industry, I've seen the best and the worst of how agencies deal with their respective clientele. I've seen clients over-serviced and I've seen them treated as myopic ne'er-do-wells. At its best, I've seen the agency/client relationship manifest as an equal, like-minded partnership. What still surprises me is that people in this industry forget that, under all the ancillary aspects of our work that include awards, recognition, creativity and new business, communications remains in its simplest form a service industry. Let me repeat that: This is a service industry; not that much unlike the one I worked in while waiting tables.

If you are a waiter/waitress, your ultimate responsibility is the customer's satisfaction. Providing excellent service can mitigate a sub-par meal. If the kitchen is running behind, then you can assuage the ire of your patrons by remaining attentive throughout their wait. If their meal comes out wrong or the quality poor, then you must be quick to provide them with an alternative. My managers taught me that the service I provided my guests was as important as the meal itself, and they were right.

It doesn't take much thought to substitute situations that occur in the account-side of agency life with any of the scenarios above. The creative doesn't thrill your client, your agency's workload has pushed the deadline of that client's project, the client absolutely hates your concept....see what I mean? And just as it is when dining at a restaurant, having an attentive, sympathetic and knowledgeable account person can ensure that the client, regardless of the situation, is as content as possible in the end.

Not to take this metaphor too far, but one more thing comes to mind as I write this. I started to really make money waiting tables once I had cultivated "regulars" (customers that frequented the establishment and asked for me by name). I developed these "regulars" by building up a certain level of trust and expectation. In return, these patrons were more apt to respond to up-selling. "You are much better off going with a bottle of wine if you plan on having more than one glass" or, "That is a great selection, but let me tell you about our special today that I think you will absolutely love."

Again, it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to apply these same scenarios to account service. The most important client in this business is a repeat-client, especially in these tough economic times. Building a relationship based on trust between your account team and your client is as important to long-term success as is the quality of the work you execute on that client's behalf. Remember, many of your clients aren't as deft as you and your colleagues are in the art of communications, as such they might not be able to immediately see the big picture (or justify the big budget). It's not your job to sell them, but rather to engender an environment of trust in which they will take you at your professional word.

If this seems too obvious a metaphor, you're right: it is. Yet each of us at some point in our careers has cursed a client for ineptitude or lack of vision or for setting unreasonable expectations. Thinking of your role in this way may just help you be better at what you do.

And trust me, you don't want to have to wait tables instead.