What You Need to Think About Before Making the Jump
Whether you are graduating from college or considering a career change, consider that, in order to be successful in both the short and long-term, you’ll need to make a lot of people happy: both internal and external clients. Let’s spend some time discussing how to make these internal and external clients happy – and keep them that way.
Tips for making internal clients happy
Your career in social media can take you many places, but most will leave you with serving two types of clients: internal and external. For the purposes of this discussion, I define internal clients as working in-house for an organization – perhaps a large corporation, government, associations or non-profits. You might be doing blogger relations, monitoring customer sentiment, or building and maintaining external platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but on behalf of one client: your employer.
Working for one client has its own set of opportunities and challenges, but to help ensure that you will be successful, consider the following:
- Why does your employer want to use social media? What are they trying to accomplish?
- Will you have the resources, both in fiscal and human capital to achieve what your employer wants to achieve (if not, you are setting yourself up for failure)?
- Can you get top-level support if and when turf wars break out over social media? We’ll talk about this later in the book, but social media has many perceived masters, those who want to and think they “own” it: marketing, public relations, public affairs, government relations, IT as well as legal.
- Do you have the ability to manage internal politics, managing up and down the corporate food chain?
- Based upon the prerequisites that I laid out in the Foreword, do you think that you could be happy in this career?
Additional factors to consider when choosing an organization over an agency include the facts that you will likely earn less money (especially at the entry level), you career advancement may be slower since there are fewer jobs, you’ll usually just a few projects, and for the most part because there are fewer of them, in-house jobs are harder to get.
Tips for making external clients happy
While many of the requirements and tasks are the same working in-house for a firm or serving clients for a social media agency, there are some important differences. Especially when you are evaluating career alternatives. The main difference in working for an agency is that you need to juggle more than one client, pay close attention to budgets and billable hours and balance the needs of the clients while trying to also respect your colleagues’ time and efforts. So when you are in the client-based world, you need to give some serious thought to:
- Are you willing to work long hours and balance the needs of multiple clients simultaneously?
- How can you define success for your clients – what communications objectives your clients want to achieve and how they will be measured?
- How to you manage their understanding of, tolerance for risk or interest in using new tools?
- What budget is available to do what they are asking you to do (we used to say that many clients had “champagne taste and beer budgets”)?
- If – and only if – online is right for them, how can you help them select the right platforms to achieve their communications objectives?
- How can you marry their expectations with what you can achieve based upon the budget that you have available to you?
- Can you effectively manage timelines and budget; and
- Can you measure your efforts based upon what you set out to do?
