On day three of my Toronto social media road show for Inter­tain­ment Media (own­ers of the branded soft­phone, itiBiti), I vis­ited two dif­fer­ent ad agen­cies, PHD and OMD.

Dur­ing my dis­cus­sions, both agen­cies had made some sim­ple efforts with their clients to engage in social media, but their clients still remained stag­nant when it came to long term com­mit­ted engage­ments. Here are a few exam­ples of the road­blocks that came up in our conversation:

• Had a hard time explain­ing that a social media effort, unlike an adver­tis­ing cam­paign, doesn’t begin and end in six weeks.
• Every effort requires lev­els of reviews before any­thing can be pub­licly published.
• Can’t even con­sider a social media cam­paign unless they can first show ROI.
• Afraid of how they’re sup­posed to respond once they’re engaged.
• Test­ing in social media isn’t the same thing as an adver­tis­ing test.

If your agency is fac­ing many of the same issues with your clients, here are some sug­gested ways to respond to these com­mon roadblocks:

Don’t test, start small: Sim­ply turn­ing a social media effort on then off can actu­ally be detri­men­tal. It’s the equiv­a­lent of unhook­ing your phone. It pub­licly announces an unwill­ing­ness to engage in con­ver­sa­tion. Bad for your brand.

Instead of refer­ring to it as “test­ing,” say “let’s do some­thing small.” The first small thing you can do is sim­ply lis­ten. That requires set­ting up cus­tomized RSS feeds on cer­tain search queries or using a mon­i­tor­ing tool such as Radian6 which many agen­cies use already. Lis­ten or read my “Be the Voice” pod­cast inter­view, “Begin by lis­ten­ing” with Chris Bro­gan.

Sec­ond small step could sim­ply be com­ment­ing on other blogs, or cre­at­ing a Twit­ter account and fol­low­ing other inter­est­ing peo­ple in your indus­try and then respond­ing to them. Remem­ber, it’s not “test­ing,” it’s “start­ing small.”

Social media lasts more than six weeks: Adver­tis­ers can begin and end adver­tis­ing cam­paigns any time they want. Not true with social media. It is not up to the adver­tiser to begin and end a con­ver­sa­tion about their brand. Online con­ver­sa­tions can hap­pen with or with­out the client’s consent.

And this has been said time and time again, but throw out the clas­sic, “Do you want to be a part of a con­ver­sa­tion about you or don’t you?” I think the worse prob­lem is when they’re not talk­ing about you. That’s more often the case for young start ups who always jump into social media because they don’t have money to spend on advertising.

While you can mea­sure social media in process, you can’t pre­dict ROI: There is a non-stop obses­sion with social media ROI and it needs to be avoided like ROI is avoided on so many other sub­jects. As mar­ket­ing and social media guru David Meer­man Scott points out, you don’t mea­sure the ROI for every sin­gle pur­chase you make. Read my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, “Social media suc­cess doesn’t begin with ROI,” and make sure you also read the very wise com­ments. And here are 15 sug­gested ways you can mea­sure social media in process.

Don’t review, train: When an agency cre­ates an ad, there are end­less reviews and edits from within the agency and with the client. To sug­gest to a client that you want to start pub­lish­ing online with no review process, is anti­thet­i­cal to the make up of an ad agency or an agency-client rela­tion­ship. Instead of cre­at­ing a review process for social media con­tent, train the staff on how you want to behave online. Treat it like you’re train­ing peo­ple for a call cen­ter. You don’t edit every word that’s said in a phone call, so why should you do the same with con­ver­sa­tions online? Here’s my inter­view with Daryl Stans­field, Dig­i­tal Account Direc­tor for PHD in Toronto, ON on this very subject.

Don’t be afraid of engage­ment: The rules of engage­ment for social media are being fig­ured out every day. And for every “rule” some­one claims to exist, some­body else has bro­ken it and cap­i­tal­ized on it (Read my arti­cle on Mash­able, “5 Peo­ple Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Suc­ceeded”). My strong advice for ad agen­cies and their clients is to sim­ply stop talk­ing like mar­keters. That’s the one form of engage­ment nobody responds to. Talk in sto­ries, advice, sup­port, ques­tions, and answers.

Social media is packed full of oppor­tu­ni­ties: There is def­i­nitely plenty of fear of going into an untreaded ground. But the fear fac­tor of “you have to get into social media or you’re going to be left behind” is not a long term moti­va­tional strat­egy. My sug­ges­tion is to tell all your clients, “Look at all the incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties social media offers to grow our busi­ness.” It’s incred­i­ble mar­ket research, bet­ter than any­thing these mea­sure­ment books will tell us. You can know pub­lic sen­ti­ment right away. You can find your avid cus­tomers. You can catch prob­lems with your prod­uct early, before the mush­room out of con­trol. Here’s my inter­view with San­dra Clark, VP Client Ser­vices Direc­tor for PHD in Toronto, ON, on this very subject.

For more, check out my brand new arti­cle, “14 Suc­cess­ful Tech­niques for Build­ing Your Indus­try Voice with Social Media” (PDF). Each tech­nique is sup­ported by a story or sto­ries of com­pa­nies that com­mit­ted to engag­ing in social media. Some­times it took them a year or two to see results. But when the results came in, they were huge.David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.

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