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Mack Collier reacts to the E-Commerce Times story on social media outsourcing –
While outsourcing might be necessary for the near-term, I would encourage companies to make every effort NOW to get up to speed on using social media sites and tools themselves. If knowing how to communicate with your customers via social media will become a necessary business function moving forward, then it’s only logical that such businesses should make moves NOW to put themselves in a position where they can handle these functions themselves.
1. Instead of outsourcing social media projects to a consultant or social media firm, hire them to train your company on using these tools.
2. If you DO outsource a social media project, make sure that part of the services that the consultant or firm provides is training on using the tools.
3. When hiring employees to work in your marketing, PR and customer service departments especially, put a premium on familiarity with social media sites and tools.
I’m amused that social media consultants are so threatened by the inevitability of social media outsourcing. It seems to me that most social media consultants suffer from a denial syndrome similar to the one most newspapers suffer from.
It’s obvious to me that the parts of social media that resemble B2C lead generation and customer support will need to be outsourced, albeit with adult supervision, like inbound and outbound call centers have been almost universally outsourced.
Corporates do need to hire employess who have familiarity with social media tools, but these employees will supervise B2C lead generation and customer support on social media, not do it themselves.
Most corporates will quickly realize that it’s costly to build either the capability or the bandwidth to manage social media interactions in- house and the only way to engage with social media at scale is to outsourse it.
Social Media Outsourcing is not something to be feared, it’s something to be celebrated, because it will mark the maturity of social media adoption in corporates.
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Comments
06.23.10
Thanks for the great read. I would just like to point out that although it would be preferable for companies to maintain conversations in the social media sphere within the company, most of the time, this does not happen. It could be because of lack of time, manpower, etc. Would that then mean that the company can just forget about engaging their community through conversations? It shouldn't. Social media engagement, although not a primary requirement for a business to function, is also very beneficial. Thus, in cases where companies are not able to manage their own conversations, this is where outsourcing can come in. It is not the idea of outsourcing that would be an issue. Outsourcing to someone several miles away versus someone else with in your company is still not you. What is vital is exercising proper guidelines and maintaining effective communication to ensure that your social media engagement remains effective. For us (we are an outsourcing company: Infinit-O), the question is not whether you should outsource, but who should be your outsourcing partner. That's just my two cents on that. Kudos!
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