• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, March 19, 2012

Prompted by technology platform partners and clients, as well as a marketplace melding of search and social media, global search agency Resolution Media has launched a social media practice called Resolution Social.

According to Resolution Media CEO Alan Osetek, the company has been planning its entry into the social media space for close to a year. “We really started looking at it after a number of the platforms we used to manage search campaigns started integrating Facebook Marketplace buying into their platforms,” said Osetek. 

The company has assigned about 50 staffers in the U.S. and 170 people worldwide to its social media practice, which currently is focused on the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. Further expansion plans are in the works. 

Osetek stresses that the offering is not what he would describe as a full-service social media practice. Rather, like search, the approach that Resolution takes to social media is what he describes as “always on ... it’s not really campaign-oriented, and it never really gets turned off.”  

It can take the form of a buy on Facebook Marketplace, “which is no different than paid search,” or what he terms “social media optimization,” where a client’s array of social media assets is optimized via search engines. It's a reflection of how “intertwined” search and social have become in the marketplace, Osetek said, noting that certain sources now calculate that upwards of 50% of all Google search results contain some social component. 

Over the past few months, as the shop has put together the new practice, it has executed hundreds of buys on Facebook Marketplace, Twitter and other social sites that amount to about $30 million on an annualized basis, Osetek said. But he believes that the total will escalate rapidly over the next year as social media becomes a much bigger part of clients’ overall digital strategies. “It’s 2004 all over again,” he said -- except now it's social and not search that is bursting into the marketplace.

The shop has anointed two co-leads for the Resolution Social practice: Gerry Bavaro vice president, managing director strategy and Erica Barth, vice president, products and partnerships. Both report directly to Osetek.

Resolution is launching the new social practice a month after its parent, Omnicom Media Group, unveiled Resolution’s global expansion for search. Under that plan, the company is rebranding search agencies that it uses in 40 countries under the Resolution Media banner. Omnicom acquired Resolution in 2005 and had previously just operated in the U.S. The rollout, which represents roughly $2 billion in annual search billings globally, is ongoing.