As a company, we have been through several incarnations and we have grown in size and vision into the company now recognised as NixonMcInnes, immersed in the social web’s culture and technologies.
Here’s how it happened.
NixonMcInnes – budding entrepreneurs
Tom Nixon and Will McInnes met in 2001 when they moved into the same office space in Brighton and with a greasy handshake over a fry up one morning, NixonMcInnes was born.
NixonMcInnes 1.0 – web design and build
In its earliest incarnation NixonMcInnes provided web services to SMEs
But it wasn’t what NixonMcInnes did that made us different. From the start NixonMcInnes was based on new thinking and bold ideas.
When Tom and Will met they exchanged two important pieces of literature. Tom gave Will the prophetic Cluetrain Manifesto about how web conversations would change society and business. Will gave Tom an Inc. Magazine article about workplace democracy in a cardboard box factory. These two ideas went right to the core of the NixonMcInnes DNA, where they remain to this day.
NixonMcInnes 2.0 – social media marketers
In 2008, we decided to break free from all the me-too web agencies and started helping organisations understand and harness the power of the social web, as it moved from the edges to mainstream culture.
We quickly became a leading UK agency, forming cross-industry working groups like MeasurementCamp sharing ideas and practices at events and sparking relationships with major blue-chip brands.
NixonMcInnes 3.0 – social business pioneers
During 2011 it became clear our work had become more strategic and broader than simply setting clients up on Facebook and Twitter.
We focused more internally and more strategically. Whether this was helping large organisations negotiate the compliance and regulations governing how you provide customer service on the social web, creating board-led social strategies that would change whole organisations and we were helping companies redesign their business units to effectively engage with the social web.
And that’s where we are today. Helping organisations become inherently social calls on our experience in helping large organisations change, our culture, management practices, social media expertise and beliefs. It is social business. It is where we belong.
