Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

This morning I came across a blog post published on Social Media Insider that caused me to sit up and pay attention.  It focused on a study published late last month by my friends at Cymfony (Disclosure: My firm, Envision Solutions, has partnered with Cymfony on a social media communications white paper and has a business relationship with the company).

Cymfony’s study indicates agencies just “don’t get” social media.  If the title of the AdWeek article on the study wasn’t eye-catching enough, the quotes from people who participated in Cymfony’s study were particularly damming.  For example:

“Clients complained that their agencies -- creative, media, public relations, design and others – typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What's more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.”

 

Cathy Taylor, writing on Social Media Insider took things a bit further.  She noted that many agencies aren’t involved in social networking sites like Facebook or have infrequently updated blogs.  (Now, I can’t blame people for not posting to blogs frequently.  Recently, I’ve had to cut down on my posting schedule because of some major deadlines I’ve been trying to hit.)  She said:

“The truth is, if you wanted to while away a few hours looking to see if agency senior executives have Facebook pages (besides the digital shops, that is), or MySpace pages, you'd be pretty frustrated. . . . As for blogs, the number of agencies that have them is growing, but overall they're still pretty spotty in terms of technical chops and raison d'etre, and there's at times an embarrassing level of "Gee whiz! We're blogging!" to some posts.”

Yikes.  In many respects I can understand why ad agencies have such a hard time “getting” social media.  It takes a lot of time and effort to learn what’s it’s all about, much less keep up.  In addition,many companies understand that social media is important, but are still leery of it – this is especially true in the health industry.  

I’m not going to cast any stones (after all, I live in a glass house too).  However, if you’re going to provide advice about social media communications, at the very least you have to have experience doing it.  As Cymfony’s chief marketing officer Jim Nail says, agencies have to “walk the walk.”