I think brands will appreciate the hard reality you lay out here,
Jeremiah. That in any scenario the brand will have to navigate complex
ever-changing territory. No single company, platform or
service can do it all. Even the big guys that are integrating social
suites, a) have a long way to go before those products integrate and
make real sense together, b) still won’t have everything a client
needs c) as you point out may tradeoff integration for best in class on
any individual application. And of course the big software suites in any segment tend to be quite
poor at integrating with each other. Across our F100 client list we see little trend towards standardizing on any set of software vs. other choices.
Service organizations that
integrate tools can help by choosing best in class More flexibility
here for sure than a brand gets from a suite vendor. But we find many
service organizations also lock into a narrow set of choices due to
significant costs of learning and maintaining tools. Recent example of this is listening tools.
Similar dynamic for the large marketing agencies that preach all
marketing services (TV, digital, print, social) and lately all social
(paid, owned, earned) have to be integrated. The client doesn’t always
get the promised integration and even when they do, it’s usually a
tradeoff of integration vs. best in class quality that comes with
specialization.
On the specialist, point provider end we’re beginning to see partnerships
without M&A, in an effort to integrate the best in class tools from
different companies. This actually lends itself more towards the
nimble, fluidly changing and API nature of social media. Though it
still is quite complex.
We generally think that in social, whether software platforms, services
offerings or marketing agencies, the brand itself must become the grand
integrator. Most important as is the case with social media itself, the
brand must be prepared to be constantly evolving, and by that we man
day to day and week to week. In social, month to month and year to year
are far too long to adopt changes.
(Disclosure: LiveWorld provides social platforms deeply focused on
management of user content, whereas most vendors are focused on brand
content. We also provide the services for our platform and others. With
that often take on 3rd party platforms in the services role you
describe. A hybrid vendor platform-services-integrator model.)
