Tell Hetrick

After several years of recommending social media to clients, communications firms are getting more okays to implement. Result? Panic. Scrambling. Backpedaling. A rush to hire young pups who know how to “do” social media.

But wait a minute. Social media is just another tool in a communicator’s bag of tricks. Social media is not a strategy. It’s not the message. It’s not the call to action. It’s just a tool.

Let’s say we advise a client to use billboards. We identify the goals, craft the messaging, create the design, and send the file to the billboard company. We, the communicators, don’t go out and acquire the land, erect the posts, build the billboard, and print and hang the vinyl. So why are so many mainstream agencies worried that they’ll have to provide all the technical aspects of social media? We use outside sources to direct TV spots and print business cards, so there’s no reason to pretend we have the capabilities to do it all when it comes to social media.

We’re not techies—we’re strategy people, word people, visual people. We rely on trusted partners and their expertise to provide what we don’t—be that buying media, building a trade-show booth or, yes, providing the technical piece of social media. Social media is like a refrigerator: we can use it without knowing how to build one from scratch.

Need ideas for when to use social media? Need to make it eye-catching and memorable? Need continuous fresh content? Need a plan to make it come together? That, we can do. Need to know how to sync HTML tags with shell script snippets to execute Unix commands and tag source code? We (and our tech partners) will get back to you.