As we’ve rolled into Project Massive Network, our social media initiative, at NCI, I’ve had a number of people inside the company ask where this takes us and what we’re going to do with it.
The core of my answer is that we’ll find out. But that everything we discover, every misstep we take, every bit of confusion that we experience, is going to be valuable to our customers. Because they are trying to work through what kind of opportunity social media will present for them, and our experience can be a valuable lesson.
Phil Johnson tackles this issue in 
a recent Ad Age column and neatly summarizes the value of walking the walk:
I decided that the best way to engage our clients was to make our own agency a proof of concept. While a bunch of us were enthusiasts who dabbled with various technologies, we got serious and developed a companywide strategy that now includes four different blogs, a commitment to Twitter, a company Facebook page, the development of agency channels on YouTube and Flickr, and a PJA LinkedIn group. A small team led this effort, including our VP of business development, a digital art director, our digital director and myself. This approach helped us to distribute knowledge throughout the agency and forced us to understand the challenges of implementation. To give one example, we discovered it was hard to create consistent usernames and URLs across all of these channels. That taught us about some of the small branding issues our clients would face.
The biggest challenge? Getting people to think differently about what kind of messages they push through their social media channels.
Social media marketing is a process of sharing content that reinforces and enhances a brand’s core identity. The brand becomes an experience, driven by content that drives communication. It is ongoing, essential and ultimately broadening.
Read the entire column and then follow the comments.
That is an example of a great moment of social marketing. Johnson took his company’s experience, created relevant content from it, distributed it through a web channel and engaged a wide range of conversation about it. The outcome: a deeper, more dimensional understanding of Johnson and his brand.
The article can be found here: http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=136559
