How Social and Digital Media Projects Differ

In Chapter 10 of 13, Carrot Creative co-founder Mike Germano shares how setting client expectations in social media projects differs significantly from that of digital media. Traditional digital media projects include product specifications and blueprints and can be built. Progress, budget, and performance is very measurable. Social media requires planning, budgeting, and building a platform and the unknowns are many.

Erik Michielsen: What have you learned about setting and managing expectations in a social media environment versus what occurs in a digital media environment? Mike Germano: Well, that’s a very good question, I think. A digital environment, a lot of people define and think, you know, the social media has fallen into digital. But if we’re going to look at traditional digital versus kind a new media social media that has two different parts, digital is I guess like you’re building a product, we have the specs, we know exactly what that product is going to look like and this is going to be pre packaged, we know we have. So, you can set expectations more easily because you’ve now set down and you have a map, you blue printed it out, you know exactly what you going to get. So, setting the expectations of how well it’s build, maybe the cost, or how long it takes as one thing. But with social media, the difference is that you’re building a platform for people to interact on and that is very difficult in setting expectations because you never know how many people are actually going to show up, you don’t how many people actually are going to participate, how they’re going to participate, what they’re actually going to say, what they’re actually going to do, and how well it can go. So, setting expectations becomes a whole different ball game. You know, you say here is the costs and same thing with the product, but digital but here is the cost for the platform and there’s the actual personal interaction which is very difficult to set the expectations, set the goals in benchmarks. This is such a new industry that people don’t know what is a very positive versus what was its negative outcome. But setting the goals for social media experience has been very difficult over a hundred social media campaign for major brands and each time you learned new things here, I think it’s starting now to flush out how people really interacting and it’s because the platforms like Facebook and like Twitter, we are now having reliable information for how people interacted, we can now starts setting expectations for social media.