On Friday we heard from Daljit Bhurji about his role at Diffusion, whether the economic downturn had affected business and how a bold pricing model has set the agency apart from the crowd.

Today, we hear how he defines the social media space, his advice on combining an offline presence with digital activity, and how to provide a truly integrated set of services.

Q: The term ’social media’ has become a real buzzword of late, which has led to massive saturation of the market. How would you define social media marketing?

The old model of communication was definitely a one-way broadcast model, relying on intermediaries to get your messages out. PR looked to media outlets with a high circulation to communicate. Diffusion thinks that there is still a big role to be played by the media, but social media marketing (SMM) has reversed this model and tipped it on its head. With so many strong communities now online, brands are now able to connect directly and at a low cost.

Not only this, but they can also engage in conversation. It’ not an advert, it’s two -way feedback with customers, investors and clients alike. The traditional idea of a campaign is that it is carried out over a set period of time, there’s uplift in sales, and that’s it. There’s then another campaign after three months. SMM is continuous, so it’s a completely different ball game.

Q: What advice can give you to people try to build a brand and integrate online with offline outreach?

Avoid having a ‘silo’ mentality. Think about how your business is communicating as a whole and take all aspects on board. Consider what you’re trying to achieve as a business, from both a practical and reputation perspective.

One mistake to watch out for is only engaging with the online space to reduce negative commentary, as a reactive measure. Though this is obviously important, it cannot drive a digital strategy.

It’s vital to put measurement in place, with realistic benchmarks. When working this out, make it specific – will it include driving traffic to a website, what figure is realistic? What will success look like?

In the early days, a few brands built very creative, critically acclaimed campaigns. But when they went back to their bosses for a bigger budget, it wasn’t enough. People want to see hard numbers, so if there’s too much focus on visual appeal beforehand, it’s very difficult to tell whether an activity has been successful or not.

Q: What kind of research do you conduct before embarking on any campaign?

What the PR industry doesn’t usually spend a long time doing is traditional media planning and has instead relied fact that if you pitch the Financial Times, you know what the audience will be. The pressure to do it yourself simply doesn’t exist.

Social media doesn’t work in this way. We spend a lot of time researching audiences; on a tactical level this includes monitoring (using services like Radian6) over a long period of time to highlight positive, negative talking points and key topics of interest for a specific group. This is an intense listening exercise in which we find out what’s been said, what’s going on and what are the channels that we can use to talk to this audience.

One methodology we then implement is Forrester’s Social Technographics concept, which breaks a group down into behavioural profiles. Using this, we can work out where our client’s audience fits and how active they are within the social media space. On top of this, we use independent research from companies such as YouGov, and assess what percentage are ‘creators’ as opposed to ‘inactives’.

We also carry out focus groups with clients, especially when targeting a specific or niche groups of consumers. Many brands tend not to do that from a digital comms perspective, so we come in and fill the gap.

Q: How do you advise clients when a campaign has technically ‘finished’, but consumers still want more?

We’re honest with our clients. Though we do work on a project basis with some, and there are cases where seasonal work (like Christmas) is appropriate, we use Pringles’ ‘once you pop’ tagline to refer to digital. You can’t just stop at the end of a quarter, as that could often create more problems than solve.

Part of our philosophy is to enable clients to carry out some aspects of digital activity themselves. Initially we might set up a Twitter feed, but we’ll then find someone internally – who understands social media and knows the brand – to take it on. We take a similar approach to maintaining blogs and searching for content. It’s not really the most effective use of our time, and we focus on pushing a campaign forward.

A lot of this is to do with empowering your client through training and usually estimate that this is a 6-12 month process. We manage sessions with the comms team, sales, investor relations and though it’s often very difficult to get the senior team involved, most of the time the Managing Director will request to attend. That buy in is vital.