This is what travel website Travelocity says after paying so called ‘chat specialists’ to surf the network that’s gained notoriety as a place where males loiter in the hope that they meet passing women on cam (and where the UK has the dubious distinction of heading the Chat Roulette ‘perv index’.)

According to Read Write Web: “During (US) office hours, the gnome “surfs” Chatroulette with the help of a Travelocity chat specialist and after hours he appears alone, holding up a sign with a clever saying of some sort about how time may be better spent traveling that chatting. For example: “Traveling from person to person doesn’t count. Travelocity.com.””

The results?  350,000 impressions and 400 conversations between potential customers and its “chat specialists.”    And not only that, the promo has attracted a fair amount of coverage in the US.   According to Travelocity, “The PR alone has totally captured the ROI.”

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A feature in Campaign asks the question of whether clients need specialist social media agencies. Though that’s not what we call Rabbit (we do a lot more than social media outreach), we’re aware that we’re often grouped in that ‘pot’, so we thought we’d respond.

Sure, we have a vested interest, but actually our take is that clients don’t need specialist shops per se. What they do need is specialists who know what they are talking about and have some first hand experience of the tools they recommend.

And at the moment at least, the latest breed of social media and digital agencies just happens to be where a lot of these specialists are to be found and where a lot of the, what you might call skills development, takes place.

It’s an open secret that given varying levels of client education in what’s still quite a new space, that it’s been possible for just about anyone to set themselves up as an ‘expert’ and roll out a presentation containing a few buzz-words.

Social media marketing isn’t just ‘online PR’
As a result, last year blogger (and now a senior executive at Edelman in the States) David Armano questioned whether as he put it, social media practitioners should “eat their own dog food ” – this followed a number of organisations in the US appointing people to social media positions who didn’t actually have any kind of significant track record.

That might have worked a year ago, but clients are increasingly buying into the idea that social media marketing isn’t simply ‘online PR’ (transferring offline habits online). Instead what is it?

1 – It’s being able to come up with a winning idea and concept, that definitely hasn’t changed. The other week, the creator of spoof website mydavidcameron.com, in a post on the five lessons you can learn from his site, admitted that number one was the fact that he had a winning idea – everything else stemmed from that.

2 – It’s having an understanding of how whatever you do can translate throughout the rest of the marketing mix, rather than sitting in a digital silo.

3 – It’s having an appreciation of how things evolve online, where the gap between items being talked about on social networks and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

4 – It’s having an understanding of metrics. Part of our job is a numbers and planning one, and being able to make sense of the various sentiment and influence analysis tools out there.

5 – But finally, it is knowing about the right tools to use to get the job done, and there nothing beats first hand experience.

Just Google the team

Recently, a client googled both fellow-Rabbit Louise and myself as individuals to see if we had any kind of online footprint. Fortunately we do, and we shouldn’t really be in the space if we don’t.

That seems like good practice going forward. If an agency comes up and presents ‘social media’ or any kind of digital strategy, google the individual team members just you would a job candidate. What do you find and what have they done? Do they use whatever they are recommending in a personal capacity, and do they also interact with their peers online?

In response to David’s post last year, one of the few comments in disagreement pointed out that media planners don’t always have experience of using the products they work for. A better analogy would be this – would you allow someone who doesn’t actually watch much TV to advise you on your TV strategy?

Image – Mai Le

Graham Holliday who blogs from Rwanda has published this excellent presentation about he disseminates information using free tools and a patchy, expensive Internet connection.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention and Graham has found some simple, but effective ways of getting the word out.   Definitely worth a read through and something the more broadband rich among us can learn from.

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Something that’s been discussed at length in the past, and is also a topic on the agenda for the forthcoming Bean Cast, is the whole issue of agencies practicing what they preach in terms of social media.

So…it’s easy to rock up and recycle some stats and facts about consumers taking control, being part of the conversation, blah, blah…but do you have any credibility if you don’t have any 1st hand experience of being in this space yourself?

Not surprisingly my answer is not really.   I wouldn’t go as far as saying that you need years of Internet experience, but some kind of hands-on, direct knowledge is crucial.

Unfortunately AdWeek has stats that show that all too often what we do is window dressing – while 56% of agency bosses say their company has a blog, 66% blog no more than once a month.   Similarly 56% say they have a Twitter presence, but at the same time 57% tweet once a month or less.

Part of the problem, from personal experience, is finding the right way to use agency profiles so that it’s not a straight forward sales pitch, and that it’s updated often enough.

At Cow our Twitter feed was until last month, used fairly infrequently, for the simple reason that the two people updating it – my fellow digital Cow, Louise, and myself - each had our own personal Twitter profiles and just naturally concentrated on those 1st, even if it concerned agency news.

The solution we came up with was to give the feed to everyone in the agency on rotation where they talk about things of interest to them, which personally I think makes it less sales focused, as well as making it look more busy.   It also puts more of a human stamp on our – corporate – social media profiles.

An example from Australia

On a much larger scale, McCanns in Australia and New Zealand, seems to have much the same in mind.  Strategist Mark Pollard has a post up today on how the agency is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Oz – and a key part involves a complete website revamp – preview image above.

By the looks of things, the site will become primarily ‘social’, much like CP&B did the other month.   But there’s an added element in that McCann staffers have created new stuff specifically for it.

When the site goes live tomorrow, new content created by staff in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney will go live, with an internal incentive for the content that gets viewed the most.

According to Mark, “through the project we’re hoping people get to experience the power – or perhaps lack of – of their own personal networks, the role content plays in social and search, the unpredictability of being online, how being transparent and authentic is not to be feared, and so on.”

And so to rounds things off, maybe the secret in where some agencies go wrong can be found in the questions asked in that survey.

Agencies bosses were asked about social media…yet these are people who still by and large learned their craft in a traditional marketing world.   Some of us are ‘digital immigrants’ in the sense that we’ve made the effort to learn, while others are less active.

We tell our clients that consumers now have control over our brands.  Perhaps the same applies to us.  Rather than adopting a top down model in controlling our social media policies, the way for agencies to become both authentic and effective is for everyone who is part of our organisation to feed into them.

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A sign of how online shopping has moved into the mainstream can be seen from the Allurent Holiday Online Shopping Survey in the States.

Buggy sites, difficult to understand navigation and a lack of features will leave Internet shoppers cold, with 60% of all consumers and 73% of “power shoppers” saying that their online shopping expectations had increased over the past twelve months.

Among the findings:

Variety is the spice of (online) life: Over half (57%) now consider themselves ‘sophisticated online shoppers’ and want retailers to try new and different things online

Yet at the same time, almost half (45%) say that most online retailers are by and large the same with price and availability the only real differentiators.   The opportunity is therefore for websites to concentrate on the overall experience.

According to Graeme Grant, COO at Allurent:

“The survey makes clear that the majority of consumers are now very comfortable with e-commerce. The question retailers now must ask themselves is: ‘What are we doing to meet the higher expectations of these sophisticated shoppers?’

“In 2009, I think we will see that those retailers who continue to innovate on their online shopping sites are the winners, while those who do not are left behind.”

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