While at lunch with a friend earlier today, I noticed a huge store on that busy road having an army of attendants to handle valet parking to the store’s customers. They were all standing outside the store and helping the store’s visitors park their cars elsewhere…somewhere quite far away, considering how space is a massive premium on that road.
Then I recalled a friend complaining about how his car was damaged when he had given it to a valet, in an Italian restaurant in an adjacent road.
This is an interesting analogy to explain the attitude towards social media in organizations.
The perfect situation would be to have your own parking space so that your visitors could comfortably park their vehicles and enter your store. But, your current infrastructure may not allow you to create so much space for parking. So, you hire attendants to enable valet parking and hire space elsewhere. In that process, you also have to depend on the quality of attendants you hire to protect your reputation. Making parking space available in your premises may not happen at all, for all you know, given the kind of place/location your brand needs, but the kind of people you hire to handle valet parking is in your hands.
Now, replace the notion of ‘valet parking’ with ‘social media’, and ‘attendants’ with ‘social media agencies’. I’m sure you get the drift.
This may be my shortest blog post yet, here.