What’s The Role of Agencies?

Had a nice chat with Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks, Inc yesterday afternoon. Jamie is a reformed ad guy like me, building a business here in Boston that combines services and proprietary technology to ease brands into social media.

Here’s Jamie explaining the genesis of Brand Networks, Inc.:

Smaht guy, even with all that hair.

The scope of Jamie’s business reflects the challenge of providing clients with a complete solution to a problem/opportunity with lots of arms and legs. Good execution in social media can start simply enough, but over time it touches questions about headcount, outsourcing, technology, business process change, measurement and even ownership. We spent much of our time talking about one of the central questions in this space: What is the long term role of the agency/external service provider?

Will service providers play a role in transitioning clients into the medium, then step back and empower them to execute on their own? Or will agencies/pr firms/specialized intermediaries “manage” these activities on behalf of brands, and in the process create a whole new line of business for themselves?

Burger King’s @theBKLounge promotion on Twitter heated up this debate just today. I think the answer lies in differentiating among the different kinds of activities inherent to social media participation:

• Monitoring – Which really boils down to keeping track of what’s happening in the endlessly branching online conversation;
• Participation – Which is about jumping in and taking action in response to brand opportunities and threats; and
• Activation – Which is about leveraging the assets created by the above activities to create tangible business results.

Monitoring will be owned by a handful of technical platform providers, who’ll emerge from the sea of already available options. Participation is the core of what brands need to do on their own, though there are significant management consulting opportunities presented by the need to develop new competencies and business processes to support them. There are likely significant product opportunities in development of the infrastructure to support these activities – to compile, store, and access data; manage distributed workflow; triage inbound triggers; perhaps even automate a narrow set of administrative responses and follow ups.

But I think agencies have a real long run opportunity in Activation, the set of activities that leverage these communities of interest to drive people into stores, solicit product feedback, encourage word-of-mouth promotion and a whole set of other activities that create business value in exciting and tangible ways. In this sense, we’re building a new medium just like we built the World Wide Web. The real commercial applications will be laid atop this foundation, at some point when adoption reaches a not-too-far-off tipping point.

That’s what I think, anyway… how about you?

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Tagged as: Business process, Outsourcing, Service provider