Guide to Hiring Ethical Social Media Marketing Services

Toward Ethical New Media Consulting:

Have you seen the latest Mac ads? Its witty and effective. The ad was created in response to the media and advertising campaigns by Microsoft featuring a diverse group of passionate Microsoft users.

Customer Centric Business:
I think this response ad gets to a basic premise of business and business ethics: that you should improve your product and improve your relationships before dropping a bunch of money into commercial advertising. To me that is the basis of customer centric products and great marketing.

The Social Media Revolution:
The rise of social media allows you to invest money in relationship and lifestyle marketing, rather than putting another unwanted billboard in their face. Because that is what we need more of in an age of ENRON, Fanny May, and Wall Street bailouts.

How do you hire ethical social media marketing?
Tara Hunt recently wrote a fantastic piece on hiring social media consultants (SMC). Tara’s piece delves into several important issues in social media communications:

Lastly, an SMC you want to hire practices ethical marketing. Much related to the point about having influence in a community, ethical marketing practices maintain and build integrity within communities. …Future campaigns will be looked upon as suspect and time and money spent will be for naught.

She then highlights several other considerations when picking a social media marketing service providers:

• How much influence does he/she have in online communities?
• Does he/she understand market trends? What kind of feedback does he/she give on your product? Are there good ideas in there?
• Does he/she practice ethical marketing? If he/she suggests that you can pay people to digg up an item, probably not.

Other than that list, an SMC has to understand how to use the tools, know how to measure impact and how to get creative to get through the noise that is the thousands of campaigns already inundating people in online communities. But it isn’t necessarily getting through that counts. It is how that message is received on the other side. That outcome is going to mean results or rejection.

I think Tara’s piece is on-point on hiring a social media specialist and even has insightful principles for finding and hiring any variety of professional consulting service. For more info on ethical search engine optimization and white hat seo principles

Thoughts? How do you find and hire the best in social media marketing services?