We’re celebrating our third birthday this week and my goodness, what a lot’s changed since we launched…
Back in August 2006 Facebook was still a niche US college network, Twitter had just made its debut to an unsuspecting world, and Shiny Red emerged blinking into the light, a response from The Red Consultancy to the twin trends of declining offline media consumption, and people spending more time online.
Now there’s no way we can claim anything like the stellar growth of Facebook and Twitter, but in our own quiet way we’ve learned a few things from providing social media marketing to an incredible range of brands and public sector clients. So here are a trio of outtakes from the last three years.
1 – Goal first, channel second: We’ve always tried to steer clear of recommending our clients dive headlong into the Next Big Thing in social media (remember Second Life?) just because it’s fashionable. Instead we try to start with the same simple but essential question: what’s the business objective? Which also means drilling into the sorts of territory you’d find in a typical PR or marketing brief: what’s the timescale, what’s the story, what creative cues should we take, what’s right for the brand…
At the same time we rely on the collective Shiny Red hive mind to stay abreast of social web innovation so that we can consider new tools as part of our strategic response – but only if they offer the right route for the brand.
2 – Clients are upping the ante: In the last 9-12 months I’ve noticed a real sea change in the sorts of client conversations we’re having. Three years ago we worked mainly with tech brands like Nokia and Microsoft who saw their brands and products being debated online by tech bloggers and wanted to join in. Now the mix includes FMCG brands, global names in pharma, online retailers and the public sector. Each has a range of consumer and industry audiences to reach, and each needs a nuanced approach to social media.
Clients increasingly look to us to deliver greater levels of innovation for many intertwined reasons, not least that their own hands-on experience of social media has grown. And unlike three years ago there aren’t many meetings I sit in today where prospective clients need convincing that their audience is online. Like us they’re seeing an explosion of brilliant and effective digital campaigns that are constantly raising the bar for the whole social media marketing sector – which is good news for all of us working within it. As a result, creativity remains at a premium.
3 – Offline doesn’t have to mean anti-social: We’ve always worked on a mix of campaigns, some of which are online-specific, others that are fully integrated across on- and offline media. Clients want to maximise ROI, while offline media is increasingly influenced by the social web.
An example: we recently worked with our colleagues at Red on behalf of MySpace to pitch a story about voter intentions ahead of the European election to political bloggers. Minutes after we contacted Iain Dale, he popped up on Sky News as an interviewee, namechecking MySpace twice in a matter of seconds. Serendipity, yes, and also a reminder that content doesn’t just sit in a box called “digital” or “traditional media”.
