I love this post by Tom Humbarger. It goes directly to the point I made here that if you are using an agency to build, manage, create, and strategize your social media work you need to ask yourself, are they doing as good or better than you? Forrester released their report on community platforms last week, you can get a copy from Telligent. As part of their criteria they measured how active the vendors are in the social media community. How engaged are they in the dialog? Do the company leaders blog, vlog, tweet, and generally participate and contribute to this vibrant community. I think this is absolutely a fare assessment criteria. I sent out an RFP last month to find a social media agency for Windows and my first filter on whether or not I invited an agency to participate is if they had a compelling blog. You can have a company blog, but if it’s updated every 8 weeks that just doesn’t count. Your agency needs to be a regular contributor. Why? Because if you don’t walk the talk how can you truly be the best?  If I am planning to train for a marathon am I going to look for advice from someone that runs them regularly and know intimately the pitfalls and workarounds or am I going to take advice from someone that’s never actually run a marathon but thinks it looks really fun. And I don’t just mean the top head honcho guy. If the head honcho ‘face’ man is the one engaged with the community that experience is likely not going to trickle down to your project team. I had an agency submit a response to my RFP last month and list their top brass as team members. That sets the expectation that those people are going to be day to day contributors to my project team and I didn’t have confidence that was going to be the case. Are your front line people engaging? What better way to learn that real life. Novel idea.