Social Media – How we see it

We recently wrote a piece for The Drum magazine sharing our thoughts on social media. In case you missed it last Friday here’s what we had to say;

Integrate social media into agency culture and thinking – don’t bolt it on

As a industry not unfamiliar with hype, acronyms and of course a bit of bullshit it’s easy to see how social media got swept up in the same way. So much fluff has been written on the topic, so many articles blogged, tweeted and re-tweeted by social media ‘experts’, most based on the same misguided idea that social media is a bolt on to other communication activity. It’s quite boring, unhelpful and its clogging up my search results.

Instead advice needs to be based on integrating social media into agency culture and thinking. Social media isn’t the phenomenon – the shift in society, behaviour and the way we advertise because of social media is.

What mistakes are being made?
Social media channels and related tools need to be used to execute an overall communications strategy. They are not stand-alone nor should they be a set of tick boxes. Think of social media this way and you’ll end up with a Facebook page that says nothing about your brand, isn’t in keeping with the overriding brand strategy or other media campaigns at that time, doesn’t have remotely interesting content but is just promoting last season’s products, doesn’t really give users a want or need to join and therefore remains a lifeless exhibition of how unpopular and un-innovative your brand is for the world to search, view and comment on. It would probably be better if you hadn’t had bothered.

Likewise trying to exist in every social network out there will have a similar result (never trust a company that has a long list of social media badges displayed on their site).

Remember one of social media’s advantages is that it offers direct engagement with smaller more defined groups of people. Unless you’re targeting kids or bands for example, there is no need to have a profile on MySpace.

~katie