A feature in Campaign asks the question of whether clients need specialist social media agencies. Though that’s not what we call Rabbit (we do a lot more than social media outreach), we’re aware that we’re often grouped in that ‘pot’, so we thought we’d respond.

Sure, we have a vested interest, but actually our take is that clients don’t need specialist shops per se. What they do need is specialists who know what they are talking about and have some first hand experience of the tools they recommend.

And at the moment at least, the latest breed of social media and digital agencies just happens to be where a lot of these specialists are to be found and where a lot of the, what you might call skills development, takes place.

It’s an open secret that given varying levels of client education in what’s still quite a new space, that it’s been possible for just about anyone to set themselves up as an ‘expert’ and roll out a presentation containing a few buzz-words.

Social media marketing isn’t just ‘online PR’
As a result, last year blogger (and now a senior executive at Edelman in the States) David Armano questioned whether as he put it, social media practitioners should “eat their own dog food ” – this followed a number of organisations in the US appointing people to social media positions who didn’t actually have any kind of significant track record.

That might have worked a year ago, but clients are increasingly buying into the idea that social media marketing isn’t simply ‘online PR’ (transferring offline habits online). Instead what is it?

1 – It’s being able to come up with a winning idea and concept, that definitely hasn’t changed. The other week, the creator of spoof website mydavidcameron.com, in a post on the five lessons you can learn from his site, admitted that number one was the fact that he had a winning idea – everything else stemmed from that.

2 – It’s having an understanding of how whatever you do can translate throughout the rest of the marketing mix, rather than sitting in a digital silo.

3 – It’s having an appreciation of how things evolve online, where the gap between items being talked about on social networks and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

4 – It’s having an understanding of metrics. Part of our job is a numbers and planning one, and being able to make sense of the various sentiment and influence analysis tools out there.

5 – But finally, it is knowing about the right tools to use to get the job done, and there nothing beats first hand experience.

Just Google the team

Recently, a client googled both fellow-Rabbit Louise and myself as individuals to see if we had any kind of online footprint. Fortunately we do, and we shouldn’t really be in the space if we don’t.

That seems like good practice going forward. If an agency comes up and presents ‘social media’ or any kind of digital strategy, google the individual team members just you would a job candidate. What do you find and what have they done? Do they use whatever they are recommending in a personal capacity, and do they also interact with their peers online?

In response to David’s post last year, one of the few comments in disagreement pointed out that media planners don’t always have experience of using the products they work for. A better analogy would be this – would you allow someone who doesn’t actually watch much TV to advise you on your TV strategy?

Image – Mai Le

I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

This is a short post for the forthcoming Cow Digital digest, which Louise Doherty and myself put together every week.  Sign up for it here!

According to Google, the fastest growing search terms for 2009 so far have been Michael Jackson, Facebook and Tuenti, the latter being a leading Spanish social network.   Meanwhile the top three searches for Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, are likewise Michael Jackson and Facebook, with Swine Flu in third place.

Perhaps of more interest is Google’s list of fast falling searches.  Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger all figure.  

So, perhaps worryingly for the brands in question do video sharing site Daily Motion, social network Bebo and Nintendo’s game console, the wii.

Now here’s a subject close to my heart, the continued usefulness or otherwise of the age old press release. Publisher Ragan Communications and PollStream carried out a survey in the States, which found that only 49% of PRs think ‘it’s as useful as ever’, while 33% thought it was a ‘necessary evil.’

Ragan’s Lindsey Miller says press releases are becoming ever less useful due to – yep, you guessed it – social media. According to Marketing Charts, Ragan’s take is that communicators are using social media to get around ‘canned’ information and to target and reach journalists. And obviously via Twitter lists is yet another way that can be done.

I guess it all depends what you define a ‘press release.’ Does it really have to follow the conventional standard for it to be classed as one? For example, some companies have started using blog posts in place of standard releases – Twitter is a prime example. It’s something that makes sense in certain circumstances but to my mind, a corporate post is a release of sorts.

Image – Bohman

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Chances are you’ve been diverted here by the old News from the Herd feed.

This blog has been in existence for a good six months.   The original idea was that as I’m a bit of a statistics geek, and most of my posts really involve me churning out commentary on social media and marketing stats, I could do with a new site.

Hence the name, which comes from a Mark Twain (or Disraeli, whichever you prefer) quote.

The idea was this would become my main window to the outside world, and an additional one for Cow.

However, as I found out, maintaining one blog is difficult enough let alone two, so this one was put on the back burner.   But with the domain name thisisherd.com having run out, it was as good a time as any to make the switch.

It more accurately reflects what I write about (Herd was a division of Cow, long since defunct and more recently replaced by Cow Digital) and it will give me the chance to start again, including the long climb back up the AdAge150 list (assuming they accept me straight away) – a good exercise, as it’s obviously an advantage to know 1st hand what works in pushing a site up the rankings before you advise clients about the same.

I’ve imported all my old posts from blogger to wordpress and all seems to be working fine, except – for now – it doesn’t seem to save every comment.  Apologies, bear with me on that one.   I’ll have it sorted by Monday.   Any questions or comments in the meantime, Twitter DM me (dirkthecow), or email me dirk at cowdigital.co.uk

(Update – It seems the comment problem is due to an over eager Akismet plug-in, which identifies too many things as spam.   I’ll check it every day to move any non-spam comments across and I am hoping Akismet rapidly gets better as it claims it does!)

Image – Jamie Thompson