Who owns social media?

This is some stuff I banged out for a recent Neilson Online newsletter.

It’s brief, and shallow, but it addresses something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and working on with our clients. The ‘who owns this’ part of the getting to grips with social web and online conversations.

I keep drawing this picture to illustrate the challenge:

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Who owns the social media beast?

Suddenly the world is different…
In the good old days everything was safe, stable and known inside the big corporation. We were cosy.

Marketing created the outgoing noise. Customer services dealt with the incoming noise. PR owned the media. And Brand owned the brand. Yeah this is overly facile, but the divisions on the playing field were pretty clear, and were largely respected. And then the internet changed everything.

Now social media, with consumers publishing and sharing digital oceans of content amongst one another on a flattened, frictionless, disintermediated plane, has made a nonsense of our demarcated areas of responsibility. For example, if a consumer publishes a hate-ridden review of a new mobile phone, and many other consumers join in, adding their weight to the story which gains momentum and swirls and snarls and bites, is this a PR issue, or a marketing issue, or a product issue, or a customer services issue? Who ‘owns’ the social media beast?

The answer, we think, is easy. Everyone!
It’s true but it’s probably not what we want as senior people or business owners (and I know, because I am one). which is usually a simple focused solution: a clear one-stop go-to-man approach. ‘We’ll appoint someone: David owns social media!’ Nope. It won’t work.

The clue is in the problem.
Social media is very hard to define because it the spaces, channels and technologies are many, and ever-proliferating, and the content, the topic matter, is as broad as life itself. Fascinated by ant farms? Find everything you need to know online. Desperate to know who King Tubby is? Find the answer and his biggest fans online. So the challenges and opportunities that our businesses face in this new online era are as multi-coloured and multi-flavoured as we can imagine (and then some) – they will cut across every part of our organisation, of our industry and of our brands.

So we all own this social media beast.

You own your part of it. If you’ve buried your head or hoped and expected Ted in marketing to pick this up, think again. The world is out there. Your impenetrable company fortress walls have been broken. So whether you’re in market research or engineering, take a peek outside. Start listening and learning and participating in the conversations. The sooner you do, the better you’ll do. Take ownership of your part today – you won’t regret it.

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Yes? No? Bovvered?

Will McInnes wrote this on 17.07.08 – 6 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Social media, Social networks, Strategy box

Are you our new Account Director?

Role

Account Director*

* It’s been helpfully pointed out that this may be a higher level position than the average Account Director in a PR agency. Basically, head up the loving and looking after of our clients, and in time shape and mould that function, and reap the financial and real-world rewards as they grow. If you’re as good as we want you to be then you’ll be a board director, a company director, take on other areas too, end up running the joint. I’m getting carried away (maybe), but the point is this isn’t just ‘you get the word director in the job title’. This is: you behave like a director, think and act like a director, make good shizzle happen.

(plus any fancy words you want to add e.g. Digital Account Director; Social Media Account Director)

Rewards

A rewarding combination of Salary and our juicy Annual Profit Share Scheme will be negotiated
Indicative salary range is £35,000 – £42,000
Assuming we’re all performing and flying along the bonus will be thousands of pounds but not tens of thousands

Background

NixonMcInnes has acquired an enviable client base of top brands, and would like to find a capable, experienced Account Director to join the team to nurture and develop the relationships within these client organisations to ensure that we deliver the most value we possibly can.

Purpose

To grow our business by growing the relationships we have with our clients, and consistently delivering incredible business value to those clients.

To focus on profitability through to delivery (as opposed to sell it and run).

This new director will be a peer to the two founding directors, Will McInnes and Tom Nixon and will join a talented, young management team mainly grown from within.

The role will be focused on clients, but with a flexible remit to help shape and develop the business. It’s an exciting opportunity to be a part of a successful business that still has a huge amount of potential.

Experience & credentials

Management experience in an agency or professional services firm: especially PR, or digital media; marketing, management consultancy, strategy or similar.

We are particularly interested in candidates who have worked at director level, however this is not an essential requirement.

Experience of managing top brand clients for professional services where individual clients may have an annual value of >£150K, as well as proven track record growing such relationships from an initial smaller ‘in’

Experience delivering high quality consultancy, speaking, training and reports

Demonstrable experience of making improvements to how an agency business performs.

Managing and developing people.

Expertise in at least one practical discipline related to the services that we deliver for clients. This might include PR, brand; design; content; strategy; marketing.

Professional or graduate qualifications would be interesting but not required

Excellent industry contacts.

Responsibilities – high-level

Aggressively expanding our client relationships by ensuring that clients rate the quality of the relationship with us and the business value they derive from our work together as greater than that of any other agency they work with

Taking full responsibility for the relationships between our company and our clients’- the buck stops here, with you

Ensuring that the client expectations set at the sales stage are exceeded.

Contributing to strategic company decisions.

Helping to recruit, manage and develop other members of the team.

Responsibilities – in detail

Understanding client needs:

Understand an individual clients needs – at all levels from business to project.
With the client build an annual strategic plan that identifies new opportunities and projects, and required service/maintenance activities.
Understand the environment the client operates in – by understanding their industry trends, competition, market, financial situation, operations, culture, IT infrastructure, business challenges. and so on.
Support the Sales team with the development and submission of pitches, and closing sales.
Work as a consultant to help the client understand their needs and issues and lead them proactively towards finding solutions.

Resources:

Ensure the resources required for the execution of the client’s strategic plan are made available.
Help the client find the resources they need either within NM or elsewhere.

Relationships:

Build a strong and trusting relationship with the most appropriate client contact.
Ensure strong and strategic relationships are maintained and developed between the client team and the NM team.
Facilitate the creation of networks of people both within and between multiple clients.
Create a context for successful relationships between NM and the account, including creating and implementing project escalation processes and procedures.

Intelligence:

Ensure clients have an accurate and up-to-date picture of the services that NM provides.
Keep the internal NM team informed of the client’s strategic and tactical direction.
Prepare accurate forecasts for renewal business and input into the sales forecasting process.
Give input to Marketing, and input into marketing campaigns.
Give input to product and service development within NM based on what clients need.
Ensure that all necessary information about the client and the relationship is available and up-to-date.
Report progress in achieving results with clients to the Board/Sales Director.

Developing NixonMcInnes:

Support and coach other people working with clients.
Contribute to the broader development and growth of NM.

Characteristics

Organised; likeable; optimistic; robust; assertive; diplomatic; ambitious, streetwise.

Excellent commercial awareness.

A passion for the web and social media.

People-oriented and approachable.

Willing to challenge and change the business.

Able to lead a cross-functional team, and to convince and carry the team and client when necessary

Ability to Get Things Done.

Highly organised.

Commitment to our highly open, transparent and democratic company culture.

Ability to step back and look at the big picture.

Ability to balance short- and long-term results.

Sense of humour and fun to be with.

Company info

Nixon McInnes is a digital agency specialising in social media. We are based in central Brighton, 200 metres from Brighton Pier. Founded in 2000 we are now a team of 17 and widely recognised as leaders in our field.

We help our clients to understand the changing world online and then craft the campaigns, websites, tools and ways of working that enable them to harness social media to improve the way they communicate with the world.

The work we do truly blurs the lines between online marketing, online PR, business strategy and web design and build.

Our clients include Channel 4, BMW, O2, Fat Face, MORE TH>N, First Capital Connect; Neilson Active Holidays; Harley Medical Group; Stannah; Southampton University and Cisco.

Company culture

We have a refreshing and unique company culture based on a number of guiding democratic principles:

Freedom: To work the hours that suit you (very flexible working policy – way more than flexitime and duvet days); wear what you want; change and improve things.

Transparency: Open book accounting so everyone knows what everyone else earns and how much profit is made; open communication and distaste for secrets.

Participation: Flat company hierarchy; voting on key company decisions; regular guest seat at company board meetings.

Personal development: Regular one-to-one catch-ups with a director; a training budget; books and subscriptions; conferences; personal development planning; a chance to shape your career within a successful, growing company with a wide range of promotion opportunities.

Rewards: excellent salary; performance and company profit-related bonuses. 24 days holiday per year plus bank holidays and a company vote on additional holiday at Christmas. We like a nice team lunch on the company regularly too.

Fun: Life’s too short to focus only on money.

Application process

You wanna apply? Cool! To apply, please email Will McInnes with your CV (first name and then our domain name above).

Successful applicants will have an initial brief telephone chat with Will, and then a series of informal and formal meetings with the directors and co-workers at NixonMcInnes. At later stages we will introduce a few small real-world tests or scenarios to give you a chance to prove your abilities and strut your stuff.

For short-listed candidates we will then also be using a personality test because a previous (wonderful, and insightful) team day indicated we had a bias towards some particular personality types and we are looking to create a more diverse team in every sense.

Every applicant will be contacted with feedback.

I hope you see the thoroughness demonstrates our commitment to quality. Bonjour.

Will McInnes wrote this on 16.07.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Recruitment box

We are PR Pirates. Are you? Share in the spoils.

We are looking for a pirate, a special kind of PR pro, someone with the experience and streetsmarts of an Account Director, to join our unusual progressive team and help change the world.

You see, when it comes to revolutions, to really being innovative, and brave, and different, the majority of people like to talk about it, but don’t really do it. People talk about and read about being pirates, but then they join the Navy.

We’re actually doing it.

We have the clients, the brand, the reputation, the Brighton HQ* and digital cojones to deliver against the mixed up, multi-channel, fragmented media future.

We are pirates: we are a social media agency. (Probably the UK’s largest, if size makes you feel fizzy down there.)

Our agency is a modern hybrid and now spans consultants, user experience specialists, brand experts, designers, project managers and web developers. We take our clients through awareness and education, to strategic and tactical planning, through to full service digital design and build to actually deliver real changes to our clients digital marketing communications.

We are blended…but we want to enhance a key part of the blend – we clearly need a seasoned, experienced, clever PR practitioner to add their goodness to the blend. We have now won a number of clients where our key contact and decision maker is from the PR side of the client organisation. We want to take the old PR pie, and eat it the parts of it that are stale, dulled, and left currently sat untouched.

The opportunity.

The opportunity is to create and oversee the delivery of hybrid services which evolve and take the best of traditional PR and soak and enrich it (and yourself) in a spicy hot digital stew, and to deliver those new dishes to a hungry clientele who are listening to, learning from you, and wanting more of what you’ve got. Those clientele are also blended in terms of which part of their organisation they come from: from marketing, PR, internal communications and more.
The opportunity is to enable client organisations to transform how they communicate with their publics and adapt how they think of and then ‘do’ engagement, and landscape, and influencers, and their role internally.
The opportunity is to be special. To be the first ‘from PR originally‘ practitioner in a team of top talent.
To change how clients perceive what an agency can give them.
The opportunity is to be really different, and to keep being more and more different, and to be sought out for that difference by clients, by peers, by co-workers and journalists and conference organisers and everyone else who wonders how the future might look while you’re getting on and creating it.
The opportunity is to really make a difference and a dent in the navel-gazing incestuous nest (hey, we know – we’re part of it!) of marketing services agencies.
The opportunity is to tell me as a peer to stop writing ridiculous metaphor-ridden hyperbole, and stand shoulder to shoulder with peers, amongst a flatly-structured team of really nice people that care about their work.

* Before I forget, why highlight our location in Brighton?

Because our community here is a real-world digital network: we have Club Penguin and Second Life European HQs here, we have iCrossing UK HQ here and a bunch of search marketing companies with enviable client bases, we have leaders in mobile development like Future Platforms and Babel, some incredible TV production companies, a strong but boring cluster of e-learning companies (soz.). ‘Convergence’ is actually visible and tangible in the Brighton business community.

But it’s not always and forever sparkling. Reality bites hard.

We work very hard to hit sales and production targets – it’s tiring, and fast-paced and basically full on. We miss deadlines. We lose pitches. We screw up and disagree. Life is hard (and then you die). This won’t be my Ozymandias moment, and our humility belies this kind of hype-y sexy revolutionary pitch. As our first out-and-out PR specialist and our first dedicated Account Director we will look to you for results and commitment. It isn’t easy being a pirate.

But the two don’t have to be exclusive: operationally, we deal with the realities of gritty business; strategically, we reach for the stars!

“It’s better to be a Pirate than to join the Navy” - Steve Jobs.

He’s right. Come be a pirate.

Interested or know someone?

Job description including outline of rewards, all in a much more sensible and straightforward fashion.

Will McInnes wrote this on – 3 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box

The Guardian Gamesblog’s Pub Quiz

As a kind of precursor to the Develop games conference in Brighton in a couple of weeks time, The Guardian Gamesblog’s Aleks Krotoski and Keith Stuart are hosting a games-themed pub quiz at the Caroline of Brunswick, just down the road from here (and well within stumbling home distance too, which is always good).

I’m certain there are enough games geeks here to take on the already mighty (and slightly intimidating) list of attendees from Black Rock Interactive, Linden Lab, NCSoft, Zoe Mode, GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer, Pocket Gamer and Future Publishing.

More details over at the Gamesblog.

Bring it!

Trevor May wrote this on – what do you think?
It's filed in the Brighton, Gaming, Industry news, Virtual worlds box

The Operations people are essential for social media success

I was talking to some marketing and web people from a Big Company today. They’re at the beginning of their journey into embracing social media. Read more…

Tom wrote this on 10.07.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Social media, Strategy box

Fantastic intro to social media with useful facts and figures

I came across this excellent presentation by Marta Kagan thanks to Paul Fabretti’s tweet. There are plenty of introductions to social media around the web but this one is especially well put together. Marta makes a convincing case for the importance of social media, all backed up with facts and figures. It’s well worth flicking through.

To view the presentation click here

UPDATE: 4 Aug 2009. Marta has released an updated version of this presentation.

Tom wrote this on 05.07.08 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Social media box