A common complaint I hear from Big Brand marketers: their PR Agency is really good at getting ink; their Ad Agency is terrific when it comes to creative concepts, but, these entrenched firms typically don’t add enough value when it comes to “the newfangled Social Media stuff.”

Yet more and more marketing agencies are hurtling into the Social Media vortex, eh?  It’s not rocket science so before long they make oversized claims about their knowledge.  And that’s why you hear complaints about “Social Media Experts” as if they’re modern-day carpetbaggers.

This paradigm made us wonder whether there’s a Third Way.

Your current PR firm nails the big press clips?  Keep them!  Your current advertising partner is brilliantly creative?  Keep them, too.  But before you entrust them with your Social Media strategy, ask yourself if their relative lack of experience in this Brave New World could be a risk.  If they make a big, visible mistake, whose brand will suffer?  What will Google remember?

You can absolutely keep these traditionalist agencies, but you cannot ignore the trends.  With fierce calls for peer-to-peer engagement and ever-growing examples of clueless corporations getting whomped on — Social Media is a trend that cannot be ignored.

So if you are a Fortune 1000 marketer, I believe you should consider hiring agencies like SHIFT Communications to work alongside your more traditional marketing partners. (I’d name those other agencies but hey, they’ve got their own blogs!)  … In the current Wild West environment, SHIFT is getting more and more calls to “socialize” an ad campaign or “add that Social Media magic” to a product launch being handled by one of their megalithic PR firms.  Big Brands are looking for an integrated approach from best-of-breed partners.

We’re the guerillas in the midst.

To that end, we’re making the following offer to Fortune 1000 brand managers:

I’ll fly to you, for free, with a strategic analysis in-hand re: your current efforts in Social Media, and initial thoughts on how to best move forward. We’ll also happily send along a killer case study or two in advance — the stuff we’re not allowed to talk about publicly.  If you dig it, figure out a way to wedge us up alongside your existing marketing vendors.  The types of services we can provide on an ongoing basis, while sidled up to your current partners, can be found here.

Meanwhile, feel free to check out this goofy video of Yours Truly announcing the Fortune 1000 offer from SHIFT (RSS readers may need to click through to the original post to view the video):

This offer is good through Sept 1.

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