The 2nd most vexing topic after “How do I measure social media ROI” is “How much do I pay for social media?“.

Friend and social media consultant, Chris has started a new company. His website display’s their pricing. B L Ochman has had a similar practice for years, displaying her pricing upfront. Its a pretty open and upfront policy which I think is very different from the many consultants who will answer the question with a standard “It depends”. Regardless of whether you think the pricing is too high, or its just right, its a starting point.

I know many consultants are loathe to price by the hour, since it means you have to work “that many hours” regardless of if you are efficient or not. Also pricing by the hour opens you up to competitive pricing – because clients want to compare prices between service providers. This is the vexing problem for most. If a consultant is highly efficient, they get more work done in quicker time, they expect to charge more. But since differentiation is so difficult for most consultants in social media, they have to bid “competitively” – thereby reducing their “rates”.

I have contracted with 3 different agencies for Social Media services before and paid very different rates for their services.

Here’s the myth of social media consultant pricing:

You get what you pay for.

Not at all.

The reality is

You get what you set the objectives for.

If you are clear about what you need to get done, great! You’ll get exactly what you asked for. The objective could be to come up with a strategy, execute some campaign or just get your folks trained and ready. Any of these comes at a price. So how about some examples:

Granted these projects were all different, but to give you a quick sense of pricing:

1. Introduction of blogging hands on class: We did this in 2006 to 15 people at our company. Most knew about blogs, but were not sure how to go about getting started with blogging. The trainer was a social media practitioner and was a pretty good blogger in his own right. We paid  $4800 for two days of training. This included a “get to know the team dinner (the previous night of the training). We also reimbursed expenses (airfare, 3 days of hotel and dinner). The objective was to get people comfortable with blogging and get them to actually start to post.

2. Blogger relations: This was included as a part of our PR agency’s monthly retainer. Our monthly retainer was $9600 and they added another $3500 per month for this project. The objective was to engage with the top 15 influencers in our space. This project included identification of the blogger, engaging with them and building a relationship between them and our product teams . We identified this to be a 3 month effort at the minimum.

3. SEO optimizing our blog content. One of our objectives for the blog was to provide content that would appear higher up in the organic search rankings. Now there are folks that wont call this social media, but our objectives were to drive traffic to our site by all means and our own blog was one of them. Our SEO consultant charged us $50 per post to a maximum of 20 posts per month or about $1000 per month. This was just for SEO and cleanup NOT writing the posts in the first place.

I’ll explore which of these gave us the biggest bang for the buck in a later post, but this should give you some ball park estimates.

What have you paid for social media consultants? Did you get what you paid for? What would you do better / differently?

Image credit: David DMuir