A new member of the ‘Heads team speaks! We’d like to introduce you to Tom, recently appointed Community Exec and all round good (easter) egg, who has a provocative post to share…

Hi all – I’m Tom and the newest member of the 1000heads team. I join from 6Consulting where I worked to provide the Radian6 social media monitoring solution to Marketing, PR and Customer Service teams at corporate clients across the UK.

In the process of finding my new role I met with a number of agencies from across the spectrum of social media, marketing and PR.

To be honest, in that time I’ve encountered some problems with the way a lot of agencies (from across all disciplines) approach social media campaigns for clients. Most of these problems are born from the way agencies pitch for business and from not putting insight and understanding at the heart of their business. Without wanting to go on a rant, I think it’s really important to show some of the common approaches out there that are giving WOM a bad name.

This seems to be a pretty typical scenario for brands wanting to ‘get social’:

1. Brand has some money left in the 1/4 budget (maybe £10k)
2. Brand marketing team decides “well, social media is something I hear about a lot at the moment, so let’s do something with that”
3. Agency called in to give some ideas of “what social media we can do for £10k”
4. Agency account team is not that clued up and their soc med guy is overstretched, however they have some pretty creds and a basic idea of what is possible from some conference they went to 9 months ago. They also talk a lot about how Dell made all that money on Twitter!
5. Agency account guys all want the fee, so they take down client requirements, tell the client they have done this stuff before and it’s all very possible, and then get the project signed off ASAP (so they get their fee)
6. Account team celebrates, then they get back to the office and realise “uh-oh, we actually have to deliver this stuff”
7. Agency hurriedly starts looking at how they are going to deliver the work, they suddenly realise that the tools cost more than they thought and the resource required is a lot higher and a lot more expensive.
8. Because the team doesn’t really understand the space they cannot find all these promised “advocates” and “communities” they have told the client they are going to map and engage with, they just keep finding Splogs and spammy tweets – maybe they should have done some research before closing the sale!?
9. They don’t know how to measure success even if they have it!
10. The client is underwhelmed by the delivery and so decides to abandon the social media initiative as it seems like a waste of money.

The above is a ten-step recipe for failure and for waste; it is also unsustainable for both the agency and the client.

I chose to join 1000heads because it is so obvious how differently they do things here. 1000heads place insight at the heart of everything they do. They don’t just listen to the conversation before engaging, they truly understand how word of mouth works, what commitments are required (both online and offline) and what media and tools are best used to engage different audiences.

That comes from experience but also from robust research which leads to real, actionable insight that feeds into everything else and that ultimately feeds into successful campaigns, happy clients, and happy employees.

I’m proud to be one of them and looking forward to working on our account with Nokia. Come and say hi if you’re ever near Great Windmill Street.

Tags: budget, campaigns, marketing, PR, social media, social media planning, word of mouth