You know what? I am a social media expert, it says on one of my name cards. With skin as thick as a buffalo’s I dare hand it out to clients and lay claim I really am an expert in this field. I dare say this because I have 5 Twitter Accounts, have over 10,000 followers (many who have names like Trixie and Angel), 6 Facebook Fan pages, 4 YouTube Channels and I tweet like crazy (about every 3 minutes or so) and have also suckered in a few clients to pay me money to set up their facebook pages and on top of that the suckers pay me money over and above the ad spend I buy for them for PPC to drive traffic to their facebook pages.
Apparently, driving traffic from ‘one facebook page to another facebook page’ is money really ’well spent’ as some experts put it.
Not to mention, the guarantees on search engine ranking page results (SERPS, note the way sprinkle jargon around here and there) I give on the Search Engine Optimization campaigns I do for them – you know what? I guarantee them on really valuable keywords like ‘what to buy in Greenwich Village on a sunny sunday’, Who says that’s longtail? They get impressed when I get it at the top on Google SERPS, it’s still there now and probably will be for a thousand years to come.
I am the know-all and be- all of New Media. To top it off- I run courses to teach people how to do this too. Shameless? What to do, we have to make a living, I have to make hay while the sun still shines buddy.
On a more serious note, what I am really trying to say is, everyone seems to be an expert and everything that shares anything with anyone seems to have a ‘social’ moniker attached to it. You have a group email application – call it ‘Social Communicator’ – a group sms solution – call it ‘ tweet buzz or something’ and slap a blue bird on your product logo. It’s getting absurd.
I have been duped by some of these ‘Web 3 zero’ experts I have to tell you. I mean they don’t even know who Tim O’Reilly is. So I got fed up and started learning this stuff on my own.
If you’re a buyer of services, here’s a couple of tips when it comes to buying any form of new media services:
- You need to know yourself what your campaign goals are for different kinds of campaigns. Are you doing direct response marketing or branding? It’s pretty damn easy to get clicks from Google (especially the content network) or banners, so please be careful with CPC pricing – please set good conversion and landing page tracking milestones if you can.
- For Search engine optimization proposals, unless your provider’s first name is Sergey,- do avoid people who tell you they can guarantee your rankings at a particular position over a period of time.
- For Pay per click -You can pretty much show the provider the door when he/she proposes Pay per click campaigns which have no negative keywords or does not know what the Google Adwords quality score is. Also, ask if he’s a Google Certified Individual, although there aren’t that many around and it’s by no means a stamp of quality.
- Do your own keyword research and demographic homework before a pitch from a provider, just go to www.freeadwordstool.com and Google Trends for to know what primary keywords you should be looking at or www.quantcast.com for some demographic data on websites or demographic proxies for your own site.
- Always know who your own competition is and how serious they are online. This helps you define how much you need to spend to beat them online.
- Always double check traffic data with Google trends or other tools available and ask for actual traffic data from analytics reports.
- Please insist on providers giving you split testing reporting on ad copies for you. The beauty of online marketing is the ability to track so make full use of it.
- A website that costs more than 100k better give you more than 100k in revenues or monetary value from leads.
So if you’re a service provider and you feel guilty doing the above – don’t feel bad because you just need to start treating your clients with little more respect and add more value. Here are some tips to help you win your clients over a little more so they think you’re the best thing since Mark Zuckerberg.
- Find tools that help you automate your work, be it campaign set ups, reporting etc.
- Always be truthful about the work you need to do, show your client exactly how much work you need to do to run your campaigns as if they were manually done, don’t worry about them doing it themselves – because they wont’.
- Don’t tell them there are tools out there that do these things of course. Once they buy-in, just automate la.
- Like the Milli Vanilli Song, ‘Blame it on Google’ for everything that goes wrong.
- Reverse engineer and always copy from the best sites and campaigns – the web is your swipe file – they’re all for the world to see anyway.
Lest my own clients start burning me by the stake and start asking for their money back ( which I know they won’t), I just want to say that there’s so much new stuff going on each day, it’s easy to sell on hype but another to deliver results. Test it out and if they make sense then only recommend to clients. Only then will they come back. Excuse me, while I go to church for confession.

Mindvalley is an online publishing company focused on personal development content and is based out on Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Employing Internet Marketing tactics and tools developed in-house, the company has already proven itself to be a leader in its field. With a team of over 40 people from over 20 countries, the company is now also looking to diversify to the non-English language market.

Recruitment Page

People Search Media is one of those rare companies who have top notch graduates from Harvard, Dartmouth etc running a business employing Internet Marketing principles and has a penchant for vigorous testing and optimization to run their Web properties. Check them out.

Recruitment Page

Owned by AOL, advertising.com is one of the largest ad networks in the US and Europe. They cover not only display, affiliate advertising but also mobile and social media widget properties.

Here’s the recruitment page

Provides Paid Search Services for clients focusing on Google, MSN, Yahoo
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Services
ROI and Optimization services for clients.

Contact/recruitment details

Hi Media is a European Ad Network which also publishes its own websites. Listed in France, the company has expanded aggressively and has grown through acquisition.

Recruitment page:
http://www.hi-media.com/recrutement.html?lang=en

Trade Doubler are an international performance-based digital marketing company. Founded in Sweden in 1999, we have successfully expanded our business over the past 10 years and today offer an integrated digital marketing portfolio encompassing:

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Click below for Careers Page
http://www.tradedoubler.com/cp-en/careers/

www.PixelMedia-Asia.com
Pixel Media is a leading Asian online advertising sales network headquartered in Hong Kong with offices throughout Asia including Beijing, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and is listed on AIM, London Stock Exchange. (Ticker: PIXL.L) since July 2006.

Pixel Media specializes in the sale of branded display online advertising and sponsorships on behalf of premium web publishers partners while working closely with advertisers and their ad agencies to deploy effective online marketing campaigns for valuable brands.

Pixel also has a smaller ad network which focuses on non-exclusivity called adsfactor. (www.adsfactor.com)

Officially launched in October 2002 as the successor company to a global online advertising network’s Hong Kong operations, Pixel Media has become one of the most reputable and respected online advertising firms in the region with presence through seven offices in five key Asian countries and rapidly growing.

Microsoft Advertising needs no introduction and has search based advertising on the Bing Search Engine and also display advertising which overs display advertising on all the MSN home pages, MSN chat etc

http://advertising.microsoft.com/ad-network

ValueClick, Inc. (NASDAQ: VCLK) is one of the world’s largest integrated online marketing companies. We deliver scalable solutions for advertisers to cost-effectively acquire customers and for publishers to maximize their revenue. ValueClick’s industry experts can solve your most complex online marketing needs today.
Valueclick owns the highly popular affiliate network Commission Junction and has grown increasingly through acquisition, including Fastclick (it’s display advertising network). It also currently has a search division and has it’s own ad serving platform.

Click here for the careers page