By Eric Krell
Social media discussions are, by nature, public. So, it should come as no surprise that consultants share their approaches with competitors whenever they talk on the telephone about their new social media offerings with business writers. Chances are that the agreeable public relations professional facilitating the media call works for a firm that already has logged hundreds of hours on social media campaigns. There's also a pretty good chance that this business writer has published an e-book on social marketing and hung a shingle as a "social strategist."
These scenarios exaggerate the current social media gold rush, but not by much. (Go ahead and search the term "social strategist" on LinkedIn.) The enterprise social platforms market, which represents one of many components of corporate social media spending, was a mere $370 million in 2009, according to IDC; by 2014, this spending should surpass $2 billion.
That's good news for consulting firms, and so is the nature of some of the competition's weak spots. "The big [advertising and PR] agencies live and breathe media all day, every day," explains Chris Boudreaux, senior vice president of business integration for Converseon, a full-service social media agency, and manager of the site, www.
socialmediagovernance.com. "But they are challenged because achieving business outcomes through social media requires internal changes to business processes,
systems integration, and organizational change management—and the agencies don't know how to do those things."
Yet, social media challenges also exist for consulting firms. "Companies don't need an army of consultants for implementations, so it's hard for the larger consultancies to create offerings that generate significant revenue for them," Boudreaux, a former Accenture consultant, notes.
Fortunately, consultants thrill to a challenge, particularly when the right offerings can generate heaping pots of revenue. "Social business is a real opportunity for large consultancies because it addresses business functions and business value chains—not just at the automation level, but at the operations and organizational levels as well," notes Mark White, the Chief Technology Officer of Deloitte Consulting LLP's technology practice.
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