3 Reasons Why Social Media Belongs In-House

Agencies are not your best brand evangelists, your company and your customers are.

They are the people whose hours and dollars are invested into your brand vision. Agencies are still great for many things -- outsourcing campaigns, producing company materials -- but running a company's social strategy is not one of them. Here are three reasons why.

1. It's No Longer About Selling

Starbucks's in-house team has made them
 one of the top social business in the world.

Since the golden age of Mad Men, agencies have held a firm position in the marketing industry as the aficionados of how to connect with business demographics. That is, until the dawn of the Internet and the relationship between a business and their customer fundamentally changed. Before, the relationship was about selling -- shooting adverts and testimonials at people in the hopes they would stick and those people would become customers. Expensive focus groups and polls had to be run to procure the insights that drove market spending. Now, along with developed technology and the expectations of the consumer, this selling relationship has turned into a two-way highway of information where customer feedback is faster, at lower cost and (ideally) acted upon in real time. In social, time is the enemy. Any excess communication between agency-company exposes a brand to more human error and more opportunity for competition to act faster.

2. Social Isn't a Silo Department, It's a Business Model

You can't outsource social media because inherently social media is about conversing directly with your customer. Social media, like customer service and CRM, is an investment and should pervade everything your company does. Say your Hoover vacuum cleaner breaks down and you call the customer service hotline. Upon taking your call you immediately hear a voice from another country. Quickly this tells your customer your business chose a lower cost alternative to solve your customer's needs and in turn lowers the value your brand places on that service. This then puts the customer at a further distance from your brand and widens the opportunity for miscommunication.

What could happen instead, in a social environment with a comparable budget, is the entire foreign customer service agency could be replaced with a small dedicated team of internal social specialists. These specialists would work across free social networks to engage and assist customers and build up a relationship with customers before they even get to the point of frustration. Say your Hoover is losing power and you're noticing it is getting worse and worse, you could tweet to Gary @Hoover and within a few hours (the average Twitter user expects a business to respond within four) you will get a follow up of either the corresponding link to said issue or a personal email address to someone within the company to work with. No longer is the customer and their issues kept at a distance, but brought in as part of the company culture and community.

And this isn't just limited to customer service. Social is an element that links each department to their end result: the customer. The greatest resource a business has is their employees, and when they treat them well, they don't only get top quality work but loyal brand evangelists. Connecting these employees/evangelists with customers should be a no brainer. Entire shows are devoted to how consumer products are made. Expensive television commercials constantly use employee testimonials to introduce customers to their people. It all closes that chasm and brings the consumer closer into investing with their brand and its process.

3. Control, Ownership and Risk

Nike, another top performer in the social space,
 brought their social strategy in-house in 2013 to get closer to fans.

Your brand's social media network is your brand voice. It is your company database of previous, current and potential customers as well as a history of interaction of what works and what hasn't. So the question is: Does this feel like the place you should be shying away from responsibility? Don't you want to control who speaks your company's voice and interact with them personally on what you want? There are great agency account executives out there, but very rarely does adding another person to a conversation help with clarity (let alone budget) of content between two parties.

In the end, if the people within a company care about the people that are their customers, they should want to be the people that own those interactions. These interactions are the human fruits of their labor and they should be analyzed, responded to and championed as true KPIs. It is the next generation of business to answer the needs of the next generation consumer -- and the best way for that to happen is to start from within.