The interesting thing is that social media is changing the search marketing industry more so than anything in the past 13 or 14 years.  Not only do social media sites, blogs, comments and other social tools effect search rankings (and therefore how companies market through search), but Facebook and Twitter have their own search engines to surface content on their platforms.  While Twitter’s may be somewhat rudimentary and giving rise to the popular #hastag, Facebook has grown a little more sophisticated as evidenced by their recent presentation on EdgeRank.

Now, this is completely expected.  With so much conversation going on in Facebook, it’s getting hard to hear anything.  Imagine if your newsfeed had everything from everyone you follow (from important stuff to lost sheep in Farmville).  You couldn’t keep up.  So Facebook put an algorithm in place to help decide for you.  This blog post isn’t to explain what an object or edge is, or how affinity, weight or time decay do to the edge score.  For now, let’s just go off of the preface that you need to have great content that people interact with recently to show up.

If it isn’t heated already, this should super-heat the space for “news feed optimization” or just plain “social media optimization.”  And it’s like the beginning days of search marketing in the search engines all over again.  We just have a few new engines (and algorithms) to pay attention to now.

And it matters.  Businesses are utilizing social media more and more, and being “found” is crucial.  And, like traditional search engines, the basis is understanding the “rules of the game” (the algorithm), but more importantly, coming up with great content.  Now, every bit of great content still needs a boost to be seen, for sure.  Smartwater didn’t just put Jennifer Aniston on YouTube and figure it would go viral.  They “seeded” it.  It’s a great piece.  And with some proper PR, social media support, and seeding with influencers, it has over 6 million views in 3 days.  Well done.

EdgeRank is just the beginning.  The traditional search portals are looking at integrating what they can from the social sites, and the sites themselves will continually work on their algorithms.  Social media “optimization” is going to be the thing that the agencies all begin to start touting.

And that’s a good thing.

PR and social media disasters are abound these days as companies and agencies continue to relegate their actives to young, inexperienced team members figuring they “know social” more due to their age.  Social media is quickly becoming an art AND a science.  And that should help shake out some of the so-called “social media experts” in the field.  Anyone can create a Facebook page or post on Twitter (or, or, or)…but you start to separate talent when you need engagement and results from your social media activities.  Now, you need to account for the algorithm along with creating content that engages, and figuring out a plan to make sure that great content is seen.

It’s not easy anymore.  And the harder it gets, the better the agencies will have to become.  That’s good for businesses as there will be fewer (but more qualified) candidates in the industry.  Although, it will be interesting when the question moves from “what’s your twitter strategy” to “what’s your EdgeRank strategy?”  At least the second is a pertinent and real question.  I don’t think many of our competitors would have a good answer to the second.

However, if you would like to know ours, or want us to put one together for you….

I recently started a feature there called “Two On Two” with my friend Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer.

Twice monthly, we debate two topics from the worlds of marketing communications or related technologies. And in our first installment, we debate whether Google has peaked and who’s winning the war for the social media landscape — advertising or public relations agencies.

And in the agency world, we all will fall on the easy answer: our people.  We hire better, smarter people and our combined experience is better than our competitors’ people.  There is a large amount of truth to that–that a good team of professionals is a strong competitive advantage.  Certainly, Elasticity wouldn’t be able to compete if we had a whole team of non-creative, inexperienced people often times referred to as “not the sharpest crayon in the box.”

But that can only go so far.  From flawed processes, to leaders who squash creative ingenuity, internal competition between practice groups to non-motivated employees, there is only so many times you can rely on “we have smarter people.”  But also, what if we all have smart people?  Right now, there is a glut of fantastic talent, and many agencies have taken advantage of that to bolster their teams.  So what happens if we all have smart, talented, experienced people?

The second area that an agency will go to in answering that question is “practice groups,” or “areas of expertise.”  For example, we at Elasticity specialize in PR, Word of Mouth, Digital Marketing/Social Media, and Search Marketing.  Others specialize in graphic design, video, government relations, internal communications, mobile, email, and so forth.  And we all overlap.  But that’s not the biggest issue.

Increasingly, areas of expertise are being commoditized such that just having the skill set is not a competitive advantage anymore.  And commoditized “products” are no longer a “value-add” to the client justifying increased budget.  In fact, taken individually, the marketplace has driven down the price (and often times quality) of each individual skillet or product.

Take our business for instance.  PR in and of itself has been driven down to keyword rich automated press releases sent out on the web for search results.  Social media is a dime a dozen often handled by interns, Facebook apps can be licensed for less than $50.  Web sites are skinned WordPress sites done for a fraction of what large agencies used to price them at, and so forth.

So when it came time to answer “what makes you better” for Elasticity, it was a great opportunity to not fall into the same pattern of other agencies and answer “smarter, more experienced people integrating the right digital skill sets to solve your company’s biggest issues and deliver results.”  (or some similar boilerplate regurgitation like that)

No, Elasticity is different, Elasticity is better because we’ve figured out the right combination of skill sets, and how and when to mix them to deliver the results.  The basic recipe is our triangulation model.  But even then, given the same ingredients (the people) and the same recipe (the areas of expertise), some chefs just make better tasting food.  That’s us.

Let me put it another way.  Remember the Coke/Mentos video?  Dropping a Mentos into the Coke created a surge of carbonated energy that allowed Weepy Bird to do those cool cola fountains.  On their own, Mentos are great candy, and Coke is a great drink.  Both are commoditized food groups (candy and cola).  But put together in a way no one else has done, it created something new that had tremendous energy and explosion.  That’s us, too.

We take commoditized skill sets and put them together in a way no one else has to take our client initiatives from a crisp, carbonated beverage to a fountain of energy exploding to create something wonderful, something with viral potential, something that people will want to talk about.

Maybe it’s the new way we approach PR, our storytelling ability, quirky content ideas, a more advanced way to do search beyond keyword tracking, social media that is actually social and engaging, or something else.  We’re not telling (at least not here).  Call it our special sauce.

Or just call it Elasticity.

Let me run through a few of them.

The Pros:

Creative agencies are fun, dynamic places.  There is a lot of energy and “play time” that goes into creative brainstorming, and you are never bored because there is always something new to do, always some new challenge to solve for your diverse clientele.  There is also the perception of the fun of taking clients out on an expense account, alcohol, and too much “play time” for the sake of creativity.

The Cons:

It’s a pressure-cooker.  Deadlines are tight, and you are often asked to solve the impossible.  Inside the agency, professionals are hyper-competitive with each other (both with other agencies and within the same agency itself).  And clients are often-times over-demanding.  You never have down time because there is always a new task to be done for someone, somewhere.  It’s like dog years, 1 year in an agency is like 7 years in a “regular” job.  And that creates high turn-over, anxiety, and sometimes problems at home (long hours, trips, missed family events, etc.).

But the one thing you hear from colleagues consistently is that there is a tremendous lack of respect in all of the above, and that it is getting worse.  Blame it on the economy, blame it on a society that doesn’t value manners as it once did, or blame it on the two party political system.  But the stories you hear from how agencies treat their own people, to the abuses you hear from clients’ demands, to the downright childish behavior in the boardroom, you can’t help but believe the trend:

People are increasingly treating each other with a complete lack of respect for the individual–as a professional, and often times as a fellow human being.

But I titled this blog post “Thank You, Clients” so let me explain.

Elasticity as been through several phases in its short history.  From conceiving the company, to looking for investment, working with a parent company, buying itself back and working autonomously as a stand alone unit.  But over the course of over 2 years, our success has come completely from our clients.  Now, I know this time of year (well, the end of last year) is when everyone thanks their clients.  “Thank you for sending us business that helps us pay the bills” is the typical sentiment.  But I want to go further because we have been extremely lucky these past few years:

Thank you for trusting in a new agency, and most of all, thank you for the respect you give us as professionals in the industry and as people.  The relationships we’ve built with you buck the trend so prevalent in our industry and makes the work we do much more meaningful.  And that extends past “keeping the lights on” at the agency.  It extends to our personal and home lives, and allows us to focus on the “pros” of working at an agency and not have to worry about the “cons” as much.  What I value the most is not the checks as much as the professional fulfillment of working in a partnership where there is mutual respect.

So thank you, JIm, Jeff, Luci, Laura, Jennifer, Kathy, Kate, Carrie, Andrew, John, Chris, Sarah, Nick, Pat, John, Sloan, Amy, Adam, Ken, Jenn, Scott, Branden, Joylynn, Nate, Todd, Maria, Philip, Matina, John, Brian, David, Andrew, Joe, Erika and the many others we work with every day.  You’ve helped us differentiate ourselves in one more way: that there can be respect and decorum in this industry.  We appreciate that rare gift.

Thank you.

It comes down to the core of what an agency is.  There are a lot of cogs that make an agency work, and a lot of ways that agencies can become great.  Most companies will say it is their people.  You may also hear about processes, tools, client lists, and otherwise.  But really, it comes down to ideas.

If you are in the industry, you’ve most likely been part of a few “brainstorms” in your day.  These meetings are generally where ideas are created — and killed.  And if they don’t die there (there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm), they have two more death traps to get past: the account manager and the client themselves.

All too often, account managers are to blame.  They get too comfortable with what they believe the client wants, and… more likely, too comfortable with the money the account brings into the agency and they get complacent.  They are afraid to present an edgy idea.  Or they are afraid to stand up for an idea and really sell it into a client that may show hesitancy at first to a new idea.

We’ve always stood behind the fact that ideas are much more than what is being drummed out of most agencies today.  We’ve always said that a list of tactics is not a strategy.  Proposing tool checklists are not ideas.  But we realize that the agency may not be completely at fault for not creating truly compelling ideas.  We realize that there are a lot of young, talented, and creative folks that are not getting their ideas to the table.

We know that clients want to hear those ideas.  We know that you can stand behind a good idea and not jeopardize your business, but rather, gain respect with your client.  Even if they don’t buy that idea.

So for the creative talent that watches good ideas die every day, for the clients that miss out on truly ground breaking campaigns due to complacency, and for the ideas themselves, we’ve pledged to create, nurture, and not abandon great ideas.

Long live the great idea.

Elasticity's new digs at 1101 Lucas Ave.

The separation enables the partners of Elasticity to buy controlling interest in the company that launched in January 2009 as a subsidiary of O&B, the 22-year-old advertising and public relations firm that concentrates on relationship-driven branding communications for the agriculture, rural-lifestyle and outdoors markets to maximize the image and profitability of its clients.

“We can’t thank O&B enough for the opportunity they’ve given us,” said Aaron Perlut, Elasticity managing partner. “It’s allowed Elasticity to quickly build a successful agency that’s caught the attention of companies nationwide.”

Elasticity develops programs for clients including Charter Communications, Capital One, Sony Online Entertainment, Anheuser Busch InBev, Stifel Nicolaus, Toro, Travel Leaders, Stout Industries, and Lanworth among other clients.

“We believe Elasticity is off to a great start and wish them only the best,” said Michael Turley, O&B chief executive officer. “A combination of O&B’s changing needs and Elasticity’s emerging ability to be self sustaining provided an opportunity for this transition. Both companies are positioned to close out the year in strong form and are poised for additional growth in 2011.”

Elasticity will move from its current space within O&B on Spruce Street in downtown St. Louis to a newly renovated space located at 1101 Lucas Ave.

About Elasticity
Founded January 1, 2009, and based in the home of the world’s largest mustache – St. Louis and its Gateway Arch – Elasticity provides communications strategies that straddle the realms of new and traditional media, often using humor-based themes, working with companies that include Charter Communications, Monsanto, Capital One, Anheuser-Busch, Toro, Stifel Nicolaus, Lanworth, SFP, Stout, the American Mustache Institute, and the United Karate Kid Haircut Association.

About Osborn & Barr
As agriculture and rural America’s greatest advocate, O&B provides marketing and communications counsel to its clients through marketing strategy, account planning, creative and digital services, public relations, media services, social and 1-to-1 marketing. Osborn & Barr’s headquarters office is located in St. Louis, and it has additional offices in Kansas City and Des Moines. Osborn & Barr can be contacted via phone at 1-888-235-4332 or 314-726-5511, or at www.osborn-barr.com.

We hope you’ve been enjoying our series on hiring an agency partner, social media and everything that could be categorized as rich and compelling stuff.  The questions for this three part Q&A with Brian Cross, Dan Callahan and Aaron Perlut came from SocialTrackr and Marketing Charts posts on hiring an agency and social media experience.

I bribed the final partner in the Elasticity Triumvirate with 10 pounds of bacon in order to go last in the series.  Being a man of great humility and a baconologist, he acquiesced.  Hold onto your bathrobes, an interview on Friday is never predictable.

How much of a campaign budget should go to digital?

Aaron Perlut, Chief Nuclear Mustache Grooming Specialist: Much of it depends on the specific target audience and their consumption of media.  A campaign for the Metamucil brand might be heavy on traditional media.  A campaign on Hispanic men might be purely mobile.  A campaign for 22-year-old women might target more social channels.  But there always needs to be balance between the varying mediums and the message must be consistent.

Has any of your digital work been leveraged for use in any medium such as print or broadcast?

Aaron: Yes. Generally when we develop a program, we build the creative backdrop first. Then we take that creative backdrop and lay out the channels, as well as the applications in those channels, for that creative approach. People’s attention spans are limited so we need to surround them with the same messages in multiple channels.

What is your philosophy on matching the appropriate technology to a campaign idea?

Aaron: Clearly you cannot create cookie cutter campaigns. They must be specific to the target demographic and the media consumption habits they demonstrate.

What has been your biggest viral marketing success story?

Aaron: Herpes……Oh, you said viRAL and not viRUS.  (Author note:  Yes, he really did say that.  It’s ok, he’s a creative genius.) Let me see here. The American Mustache Institute would have to be the one, especially when we used it as a medium for Quicken Online in 2009.

Who will create content? Can you share some samples of content creativity you have shown in the past?

Aaron:  My favorite one is an idea that got left on the cutting room floor. A pool manufacturer wanted to reach end-consumers, as opposed to pool and home builders, as a down economy meant fewer new pools and more upgrades. So we developed a “Pity the Pool” campaign around Mr. T who would show up in people’s back yards and verbally dress homeowners down for not having up-to-date pools.

Will you be able to transcend the messages on social media to connect to my brand?

Aaron: I am transcending to you now. Buy my product.

Fin.

^*Main Entry: ¹elas·tic
Pronunciation: \i-ˈlas-tik\
Function: adjective
a : capable of ready change or easy expansion or contraction : not rigid or constricted <an elastic concept> b : receptive to new ideas : adaptable <an elastic mind>

Recently, I published a few questions from SocialTrackr and Marketing Charts and responses from Brian Cross, managing partner of Elasticity.

Furious about my obvious disregard for their mustached excellence, the other partners demanded equal time on the blog which they produce.  Of course, I could not refuse.  I tracked down the most elusive of our partners who has never met an email thread-of-nonsense to which he did not unsubscribe.

So begins Part Deux of the series:

If you found yourself having to unilaterally make a decision on behalf of your client, would you execute work that builds the brand or makes the sale?

Dan Callahan, Director of Robot Strategies:  You can do both but, in this economic environment, I think you have to go for the sale with an eye toward using sales to build brand.  So much of social media seems to be aimlessly promoting brands that consumers, I think, are growing weary of a promotion without strategy.  Facebook, clearly, has become a ghetto of promotions gone wrong.   I believe consumers are looking for value and an efficient sales channel is one of the means to prove the value of the brand.

How have you spread awareness organically via social channels (or otherwise) as opposed to any paid media initiatives and how has that saved money for your clients?

Dan: We do this every day through all the social channels, creating communities for our clients who are willing to talk to customers directly and honestly. It’s turning into a new form of advertising that is more about information than hyperbole.

What’s your best example of integrating online and offline marketing?

Dan: My favorite was the digital treasure hunt we ran during the All-Star Game last summer. It combined both elements in as visual a means as possible – the contestants were literally running around downtown St. Louis looking for the tickets and answering questions at locations around the area.

Do you think small project teams have the ability to produce large scale digital assignments and if so how?

Dan: There are tools available to any agency that have pretty much erased the advantage larger organization have had. Beyond that, smaller organizations are proving to be more agile and less invested in traditional ideas. The key is the capabilities the company’s assets have and the projects they have worked on. The future is going to be written by those who learn from the past, not live in it.  (Author note:  Dan is a writer, don’t mess with him or you may end up in his book… about the future… which Elasticity is currently writing… because we’re elastic.  Sometimes I just can’t stop.)

^*Main Entry: ¹elas·tic
Pronunciation: \i-ˈlas-tik\
Function: adjective
a : capable of ready change or easy expansion or contraction : not rigid or constricted <an elastic concept> b : receptive to new ideas : adaptable <an elastic mind>

You have undoubtedly read the collection of blog posts and articles about choosing an agency.  For at least two years, posts from We Are Social and Digital Marketer to Unique Frequency and PR101 have outlined suggestions on how to cull the best from the herd.

In his post of the top 15 companies that “focus on social media” Jason Keath writes “Since almost every company would almost be it’s (SIC) own category, I am avoiding the categories for now.”  I don’t blame him.

In a marketing genre where the rules are being written (and broken) on a daily basis, it is no surprise that discerning an agency’s capabilities in the space is tricky.

Nevertheless, Social Media is the Shiny-Shiny.  It’s Hot and sometimes it’s a Hot Mess.  You need it, you know it, and you need help with it.

Don’t let fear or intimidation lead you to the wrong partnership.  There are some qualities to look for in an agency and secrecy and bravado are not among them.

Also, this just in:  Smoke and mirrors are out.

Since I’m really just here to raise the good-look factor and, of course, represent my gender, I posed a few of the questions from SocialTrackr and Marketing Charts to one of Elasticity’s managing partners:

How do you handle specialty work like mobile, social, eCRM, media, viral, digital OOH and other emerging channels?

Brian Cross, Director of Rocket Science: We are a specialty shop, so we fit some of these ‘specialty’ categories (hint: they won’t be specialty in the near future).  But to the core of what they are getting at – I believe that you should do what you do best and let the other experts do the rest.  A “Jack of all trades” doesn’t cut it anymore.  At Omnicom, I built the group by outsourcing the work we didn’t hold to our core.  We grew 10x in 2 years that way.  Look at digital shops that do their own CMS systems.  How do they expect to keep up with the open source community, or companies that specialize in CMS systems for their core?  And then wordpress comes along and wipes them all out.  Without a doubt, best-of-breed partnerships.

but that leads to another question (Author note: Brian is really smart and he likes to talk) which is “how do you handle best-of-breed partnerships?”  multi-agency collaboration and hand offs are difficult.  There is a special skill in that that comes with experience and building teams that know how to work together.  Throwing companies together to have a great partnership logo slide ain’t going to cut it.  Nor does a multi-office approach at the bigger agencies.  Too often, those city-specific PandL’s compete and even flying under the same banner doesn’t mean they can handle your work or that it will go as smoothly as promised at the new biz pitch.

Is there a particular design aesthetic your agency is known for and if not what is your approach to translating brands in the digital space?

Brian: Being a designer at heart, I’d like to say that we stand for a strong aesthetic, but the reality is that we are all about highlighting the personalities of our clients.  So our aesthetic is actually subdued with pops of creative color and personality.  That personality represents our clients.  So how do we translate a brand in the digital space?  Very easy.  We find out what the brand is about, who the people are.  We deconstruct the corporate speak.  The approved messaging that corp comm and the marketing science boys came up with.  We tear it all apart—disassemble the robot.  Then we reconstruct a human.  A personality.  A voice.  The cool thing is that the tools to express that voice are already there.  Digital media in the social sphere is made to amplify your voice.  Our voice just happens to carry further when it is more human.  Can I go back and describe our aesthetic as “human?”

How many of your online promotions have hit the million-person participation mark?

Brian: This is a crazy question.  I see the logic in that they are looking for successes, but shear numbers don’t always equate to success.  This shows a lack of understanding of the space.  Sure, if you want to define “participation” I can make an argument that we’ve done more than I can count on my fingers.  In things ranging from mustaches to TV content, to rental cars, and financial recruitment.  But were they successful in terms of the business goals?  Some were, some weren’t.  I think we’ve had more success reaching 5,000 influencers that participate heavily and recruit thousands more to our cause.  It’s the new math.  You no longer reach out to 1,000,000 in hopes of influencing 500.  You reach 500 and start to build advocates that can touch and reach 1,000,000.

How will you measure ROI? With what tools? What targets will you set and how will we benchmark these targets?

Brian: This is specific to each client.  But you need to define the “R” in ROI.  What are you trying to achieve?  If it’s a reputation management project, we may be monitoring online sentiment.  If it’s a search project, it may be how much 1st SERP real estate we take up.  If it’s an awareness campaign to drive trial of a new product, it’s the product trial numbers.  And so on and so forth.  This could be a blog post in and of itself, as I’ve been asked to calculate ROI several times.  It’s a financial equation that tracks money spent and money made.  It’s a very easy equation.  But what’s the ROI of the telephone?  What’s the ROI of a game of golf?  It’s important to draw digital marketing outcomes to bottom line business goals.  But blindly using ROI as a rallying cry isn’t the best way to judge an agency… (imho)

“H”, indeed, Mr. Cross.

^*Main Entry: ¹elas·tic
Pronunciation: \i-ˈlas-tik\
Function: adjective
a : capable of ready change or easy expansion or contraction : not rigid or constricted <an elastic concept> b : receptive to new ideas : adaptable <an elastic mind>