“What Is a Social-Media Agency?”

That’s the title of an excellent piece in Advertising Age by Reuben Steiger the CEO of Millions Of Us (great name!). Starts off by asking the fascinating question of why ad agencies, with all the client relationships and wherewithal, didn’t get their heads round how to create serious websites back in the day (I’m discounting the ‘product support site’ and interactive advertising.) Reuben relates how surprised he was the first time around that they didn’t ‘get it’ and crush him, and proposes some reasons for this:

He goes on to argue out that as time went on, ad agencies learnt that “the skills and value delivered by interactive agencies are different that those of the lead agency, and the two have learned to play together much better…”, which is all true and brings us bang up to date, to the rise of the “Social Media Agency”.

Reuben’s assertion is that history is repeating itself: the crucible that forged what became the interactive agency (macro-economic catastrophe, technological advances and rapidly changing media habits) is re-invented in today’s economic climate, media culture and technology. He doesn’t quite say this, but clearly the implication of the piece is that the skills and value delivered by social media experts and agencies are in turn different not only to ad agencies but also to the established old-school interactive firms.

We set Made by Many up in September 2007 to help clients create, manage and monetise community for brands. We’ve always shied away from the term “social media agency”, although nearly everything we do has a social dimension. I suppose that’s because we were wary of jumping on a bandwagon, but it’s also because we see the Web itself as the original social software, created by a community and delivering social media since day 1.

In London, we have definitely seen a gulf between “old new media” firms and the new model of smaller, faster, overtly social and more open and agile “new new media” agencies (if we can use that awful term). I wonder if the qualities that got the old model through the dot-bomb wasteland of 2001-3 are now holding them back. For example, one way agencies dealt with the downturn between 2002-4  was to invest much more effort in managing the development process. Because web development was risky and clients change their minds, web development processes at that stage were geared up to limit change (which didn’t work btw). Another example might be that agencies sought projects that were as big as possible. Big was good in that market – even if it made for less agile design and development, and less experimentation.

Today (and I hope I’m not being unfair, I don’t think I am) some of the Web 1.0 agencies seem still to be addicted to the ‘old ways’: monumental projects that take months, a limited palette of “technologies we have in-house”; a reticence to partner and embrace OSS; and an obsession with owning IP. Let’s face it, they have little incentive to call their clients up and say, “guess what, over the past few years it got quicker and cheaper to make even better sites so we’d like to pass that value on…” I think it’s very difficult to go social using ‘the old ways’.

The old digital agency model is not helpful today. Instead, the industry can learn a lot from social start-ups (like Vimeo – who I am in love with, or SoundCloud) and work as fast as possible, being entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and nimble – and take advantage of the best thing about Web technologies: your ability to make changes if it doesn’t work. We try and use very visual, rapid prototyping techniques to work very very fast and to ‘grow’ an idea into being like a gardener rather than a factory owner. In that sense, we have thousands of stakeholders on a design project – which is a healthier way of thinking about “users” anyway. We try to define just enough to create the scaffolding into which a service can emerge, driven by user behaviour, “made by many”.

People in traditional agencies – ‘old new media’ and our cousins in advertising – say they find all of the above quite challenging – which is weird because these agencies are stuffed with really smart people. So, it does feel as though the new model of online experience, the new ‘norm’ of greater participation and an understanding of community dynamics, does indeed require a specific set of skills and experience to get right (and certainly to get right cost-effectively). I think it’s also very difficult to set out with the ambition of going straight to the ‘doing social’ stage without building on a bedrock of hard-gotten knowledge (the ‘awful truth’ about how shonky and flaky Web technologies are, or how to get the most from people with developer-shaped brains (or even how to communicate with them), and an understanding of the merits of simplicity and how users think). It’s really difficult to get the front of that queue without paying your dues.

Setting out to “do social” or to “be or become a social media agency” seems to me to be the wrong way round. If you create the right conditions for the service to emerge (obviously, within a framework of your own brilliant ideas and a clear grasp of what you’re trying to acheive overall) you will *probably* end up with something social because just because that’s the way people want their Web to work these days.

Right, off to change our name to “Made by Millions”…