SMC Social Media Buyers Guide

Social media is becoming an industry in it’s own right, and just like every other rising star industry, the sheer volume of consultants clamouring to be your brand’s next expert can make any choice nearly impossible to make. The complexity of choosing the right solution and asking the right questions of the many available experts can put any executive off the decision indefinitely.

Social Media Club

There are dozens of conversation monitoring solutions, hundreds of white label social networks, and the noise all those gurus, rockstars and experts make can serve more as a distraction than anything else.

The Social Media Club HQ has begun an amazing research project to help figure out how to choose the right consultant, which services you should embrace and which to avoid and more.

So how do you make the right decisions? What are the questions that need to be asked? What are the services you should avoid and the ones you should embrace? How much should it cost?  How do you avoid the biggest mistakes? What ROI can be expected (brand, awareness, increase positive WOM, decrease negative WOM)? How can agencies/consultants help you sell social media internally? What authoritative resources are at your disposal to learn more about Social Media? [source]

The Social Media Buyer’s Guide is being developed to help companies figure out all of those things, but in order to do that, we need your help! Social Media Club founder, Chris Heuer and e-Strom CEO, William Gaultier are leading the project, and are sourcing information from buyers, industry leaders, agencies, independent consultants and solution vendors.

This project should have the following impact :

• Help professionals in a position of responsibility for procuring social media solutions to ask the right questions and ultimately get the right solutions for their specific needs.
• Help qualified service providers differentiate themselves from self-styled ’social media gurus’
• Increase the overall effectiveness of social media programs launched by organizations, further supporting the overall market for social media services and solutions
• Increase the efficiency of dollars invested in social media, ensuring that buyers need not over spend on extraneous bells and whistles
• Arrive at a common definition of ROI for social media projects across variety of social media projects across different industries.  eg. ROI of Social Media Launch Campaigns vs ROI for Social Media Projects for Customer Support should have common ways to measure ROI idependent of industry.
• How should Social Media Buyers standardize across the enterprise to avoid redundant purchases or avoid stepping on each other’s projects as all social media ultimately talks to the same customers.

The findings will be released at the end of March, 2009, but the Social Media Buyer’s Guide needs your help. Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts at the survey, here.  Depending on how much you want to write, the survey can take you anywhere from 5 – 30 minutes.