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

A cautionary tale comes from mobile phone operator Vodafone, who on Friday broadcast the following message out to its (at the time) 8663 Twitter followers:

Needless to say, despite being quickly deleted, it was captured for posterity and the damage is done.   Initial speculation was that the feed had been hacked, but it turns out it was a member of staff, who for whatever reason decided to mess around with the corporate feed.  Think we can safely assume that guy (assuming it’s a he) is so getting fired…

Vodafone had 8600+ followers on Friday, but how many did Vodafone really reach on Friday?  The answer according to Twitter analyzer is 797,942.    And for good measure, the following day’s tweets (many still containing profuse apologies) reached 442,917.    That’s of course excluding all the media coverage so far.

You’ve got to scratch your head a bit about how this even happened.

Was the official Vodafone feed just running on someone’s PC using something like Tweetdeck meaning someone else could just stop by and post away?   Did they have official social media policies about who could tweet and how it could be used?   You’d hope so, but the way that one tweet quickly got magnified and passed around definitely shows the need for those policies to be in place.

Twitpic photo from Mr Squishington

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A number of graphs, which are worth noting from an excellent techcrunch article by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan – Context is King: How videos are found and consumed online.

First of all, most are discovered within two weeks of them being posted up.    If your video hasn’t gathered viral momentum in the first ten days or so of it going online, it probably won’t.

55% of video views are via “discovery”, people stumble on the video, mostly via blogs.   Get that online PR campaign going!

Then, after two minutes, over 3/4 of your audience will have zoned out and clicked somewhere else.   So keep those virals short.

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• Context is King: How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online (techcrunch.com)

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

Fellow online PR Danny Whatmough posed the question today about whether social media is really about ‘ego.’   Clearly I don’t think it is, but in reply I referenced the Oxford Academic Press stat that the second most popular word on Twitter is “I.”

Journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles then joined the conversation to point out that incidences of “I” tend to vanish around lunchtime, so most narcissists tend to be around in the morning (that’s when I tweet…).

Malcolm originally published his post in April, but the chart on his blog from Trendistic is a dynamic one (I’ve taken a version below) and so the results are constantly up to date.   And sure enough, the Dec stats show exactly the same as the April ones.

Every single day last week the use of “I” in tweets was at a high in the morning in the UK (so middle of the Night US – when maybe people are on who don’t use Twitter professionally?), visibly dropped by lunch GMT (7am EST), and then started climbing again until it reached its late night US / early morning UK peak.

Not sure how much you can really read into this, but it does give an indication of when personal tweeters who talk about their lives are likely to be on, and when you can catch those who log on mainly for work / network building reasons.

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One of my personal inspirations when being one of the original team that set up Cow was Andy Law’s book ‘Open Minds.’    In it, Law talked about the creation of ad agency St Lukes in the 90s, which broke the mould by truly standing for something radical – in this case the idea that the people who provide the ‘sweat equity’ for an agency should also have a say in how it’s run.

The PR Warrior (Trevor Young) in Australia reminded me of that today in his post, ‘if you don’t stand for something, you are nothing.’  Trevor says that we need to create a story or narrative around brands that goes beyond the actual products – and it has to be authentic.

Trevor also posted this manifesto created by online rental market place Rentoid.   Full marks to them – it’s inspirational, meaningful, devoid of corporate and brand speak, puts its people at the centre.   A lot of us could learn from the sentiments expressed in the presentation!

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