I had dinner with a friend from my agency days in New Orleans last night.  We worked together as lowly Jr. Account Executives on a national beverage company’s regional efforts.  He laughingly reminded me of the day I whipped out, what later came to be known as “The Triangle of Truth”.   It was also the day, not coincidentally, when my career hung in the delicate balance of a client’s reaction.

The situation was one common to all advertising agencies.  The client needed a 48 hour turn-around on something that had to be mind-blowingly amazing but, due to budget constraints, refused to pay for either the expanded team necessary or the time-crunch premium demanded by our production vendor.

As the agency’s senior account executive and the client’s middle marketing manager argued, I scrawled the diagram above and passed it to my buddy whispering, “You can have any two but never three.”

1. It can be high-quality and fast but, it won’t be cheap
2. It can be fast and cost-efficient but, the quality will suffer
3. It can be high-quality and cost-efficient but, it’s going to take some time

What makes the story funny and potentially disastrous is that the client saw this transpire and grabbed the piece of paper.

After laughing last night about the expression of stark terror I must have worn that day, my buddy said this, “I’m afraid now that Social Media is out there, you’re Triangle of Truth is dead.”

Wait, what?

I disagree wholeheartedly.  While it’s true that many social media initiatives can be executed without big production costs or huge media spends, achieving true, high-quality, customer engagement takes time and requires significant investment.  Engagement is much harder to achieve than simple awareness.

You first have to understand where the customer conversation is occurring.  You then have to listen and monitor that conversation.  Then an engagement strategy must be carefully crafted to identify and leverage contextually relevant conversation entry points.

1. If you want to achieve engagement fast, you’re going to have to hire experts (REAL EXPERTS-see 12 Must-Read Social Media Bloggers Pt 1, 2, 3)
2. If you want to carefully manage your resource investment (both human effort and money), then engagement will take time to develop organically
3. If you try to prematurely force engagement, utilizing less than expert resources (your marketing intern that “knows Facebook”), then real customer engagement will remain ever-elusive

What happened to me, you wonder?  The client was not amused.  I received my new account assignment later that same day.

Tags: marketing investment, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 10:26 AM by MattC and is filed under Strategy and Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.