Cerebra

It’s no surprise that your event attendees are using social media for everything from complaining about the coffee, to sharing sound bites from their favourite speakers and everything in-between. So why aren’t you?

The conversation is happening so why not participate, engage, develop relationships, build communities and not only facilitate, but drive the discussion?

Here’s an idea: “take this product and send this to some online influencers and get them to tweet about it.” Yes, that is a common brief to an agency, and no, you should not simply go ahead and get that done. Unless you’re the Reserve Bank and your product is money, simply sending stuff to an influencer is unlikely to achieve the campaign success you had hoped for.

Media strategists are slowly starting to understand digital as both the client and the agency demand a more holistic approach, but what about social media?

For many, the environment is daunting as it goes against what most media strategists are trained to investigate (such as reach, frequency and Gross Rating Points). Social media means consumers have the voice to talk back, but for many, it doesn’t even feature as a blip on the radar as a channel because it’s foreign to traditional media strategy which is all about broadcast.

To me, social media fits in the media mix just as much as TV, radio or print. However, the current agency briefing model doesn’t lend itself to this type of thinking. A few different approaches I’ve seen are:

The question of whether or not to use timesheets is one that every agency has faced, and one that needs to challenged on many levels. Teams who have never logged time shudder in fear at the prospect but it doesn’t need to a scary experience. This got me thinking of how we could adapt an essential practice into a dynamic agency that prides itself on being agile and innovative.

You’re asking people to tick off hours into a prescribed big brother model – confining them in a box and setting boundaries for their interaction with the work they’re engaged in.

Today’s blog post is inspired by a Matthew Inman cartoon that featured on The Oatmeal not too long ago; http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones.
The cartoon is about the trials and tribulations of a “law-abiding citizen”, trying to watch an episode of the popular series, Game of Thrones, and how trying to do so legally proved to be quite a hassle.