Three symptoms of a wannabe SMM agency out to fool you

While I do believe that Search engine marketing can be quantified and process bound to a large extent, Social Media Marketing tends to be different.Many agencies tend to equate SMM proposals with SEM proposals and this is exactly where one must understand that these agencies are not adept at handling social media marketing.

The symptoms of an SEM extended SMM wannabe agency as identified from a proposal are as follows:

The proposal talks a lot about submissions : Submissions on del.icio.us , submission on digg, submission on reddit etc. While submissions are important, ask your agency as to why those submission resources have been selected and how they intend to drive traffic through the social bookmarking sites.

The proposal focuses a lot on the technology but has no mention of the strategy: If your proposal is filled with "creation of blogs" and "creation of widgets", "Implementation of Rss" and Implementation of social bookmarking buttons and the agency has no idea of what would go in the blog or the what purpose the widget would serve, then you know you're in touch with the wrong guys.

Everything is quantified including the number of comments,reviews etc: I feel this is the giveaway.I have often come across proposals wherein the number of user reviews( to be generated by the agency), comments on forums and other blogs are quantified!!!.
Hmm please look for another agency guys....these guys dont know Social media for nuts.If,for example the number of user comments on the proposal is 10 on a particular forum,then does that mean after my 10 positive comments on a brand if a negetive comment is posted on the forum, I would not respond!!!! Ridiculous isnt it??

So the proposal should help you gauge whether the agency you intend to employ is smm ready or not.